


Rock and Hawk

by HASA_Archivist



Series: The Dûnhebaid Cycle, by Adaneth [2]
Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: 3rd Age - The Stewards, Canon - Enhances original, Canon - Fills plot hole(s), Characters - Family Dynamics, Characters - Friendship, Characters - Good use of minor character(s), Characters - OOC to good purpose, Characters - Outstanding OC(s), Characters - Unusual relationship(s), Drama, Plot - Can't stop reading, Plot - Disturbing/frightening/unsettling, Plot - Good pacing, Subjects - Animals, Subjects - Culture(s), Subjects - Explores obscure facts, Subjects - Geography, Subjects - Legends/Myth/History, Subjects - Plants/Environment, Writing - Clear prose, Writing - Engaging style, Writing - Well-handled PoV(s), Writing - Well-handled dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-04-19
Packaged: 2018-03-24 19:58:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 51,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3782444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HASA_Archivist/pseuds/HASA_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fell things prey on the Dunedain and Dwarves of the Ered Luin. What can one wise woman do? The Dûnhebaid Cycle, Part I.<br/><br/>MEFA 2007: Third Place in Races: Cross-Cultural: General.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rowan and May

**Author's Note:**

> Note from the HASA Transition Team: This story was originally archived at [HASA](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Henneth_Ann%C3%BBn_Story_Archive), which closed in February 2015. To preserve the archive, we began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in February 2015. We posted announcements about the move, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this author, please contact The HASA Transition Team using the e-mail address on the [HASA collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/hasa/profile).

_Here is a symbol in which_  
_Many high tragic thoughts  
_ _Watch their own eyes._

_This grey rock, standing tall_  
_On the headland, where the seawind  
_ _Lets no tree grow,_

_Earth-quake-proved, and signatured_  
_By ages of storms: on its peak  
_ _A falcon has perched._

—Robinson Jeffers

 * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * 

Loneliness never troubled her, so long as she could hear the sea.  Which was as well, for her kin had little love for the waves.  As a boy, her brother had often woken her, crying out of nightmares where a towering wave drowned the world.  So when she saw him striding down from the dunes, she knew things were going ill, somewhere.

Setting her basket of winkles and dulse on her hip, skirt still kilted to the knee, she came up across the strand—a crescent of shell-white sand fingered by dark, water-worn stone—and met him where the wrack drew its ragged border 'twixt land and tide.  "Welcome, Halladan."

"And well met, Saelon."  A smile briefly eased the weary grimness of his long face.  "You look well."

"You look worried," she replied bluntly.  "I doubt you came all these leagues simply to visit.  Come, let's get you a bite and a draught, then you can tell me what brought you."

His smile twitched and his grey eyes narrowed.  "Yes, _niben naneth_ ," he answered, twitting her with his meekness even as he relieved her of the basket.  As they crested the dunes, trading shifting sand for the firm turf of the machair, he observed, "I haven't seen Gaernath.  Has he thrown himself into the sea to escape your tongue?"

She snorted at his childishness.  Jabbing an elbow into his ribs, she was gratified by his _wuf_ of surprise and lost breath.  "I should be so lucky.  No, the lad's up away," pointing towards the northern headland, its craggy green gilded by blooming whin, "with the sheep."  Struck by an unwelcome thought, she glanced sidelong at her brother.  "Is he needed at home?"

"No."  Yet his voice was hesitant, drawing out the word, and his face had recaptured its stern reserve.

Side-by-side in silence, they passed his rough-coated roan mare, which keenly cropped the lush herbage of the dune-sheltered lea, then took the narrow track that followed the burn.  Up they went to the foot of the stranded sea-cliff, testament to the wrath that had drowned fabled Beleriand and, later, Anadûnê.  In a sheltered cove far above the reach of any lesser sea were the sand-floored caves she had taken for her home.  Here the air was still and warm, rich with the scent of the may and rowan that grew thickly along the wide shelf at the base of the cliff, sonorous with the flight of her bees.  Taking back the basket, she set it down beside the spring-carved and -fed basin and nodded towards the nearby bench.  "Sit, and rest as you may."

"As I may," he echoed wryly, gazing out over the unbroken expanse of ocean, but leaned back against the sun-warmed stone and stretched his long legs before him.  The dooryard geese took offense and, beaks uptilted, paced into the kitchen garden to gabble-gossip amongst themselves about the interloper.

Saelon held her tongue.  Ducking under the low lintel of the wattle-framed doorway, into the stone-roofed dusk of the smaller cave, she automatically cast a glance at the banked peat fire smouldering on the central hearthstone, then passed to the handy ledge and took down the drinking horn.  The stoup of heather ale from atop the kist; the last of the morning bannocks, with clotted cream and honey: she need not be ashamed of the hospitality she could offer her kin when they did journey to see her.  She would need to grind more flour with a third mouth to feed, but that could wait until the winkles were in the pot.

He took filled horn and laden plate from her with reverent grace.  "Thank you, lady."

His formality only made her wonder the more what had brought him.  He must think she would take it very ill to be so courteous with her, but it would be rude to press him while he ate.  She contented herself with a gracious bow of her head.  "Pardon me, brother, while I see to supper preparations."

It was the kind of empty nothing his wife Núneth might have said to avoid an unpleasantness, but hopefully he was used to it by now and anxiety would not spoil his meal.  She picked up the basket and headed for the burn, to rinse the winkles and dulse—they would make a hearty stew for the three of them if she added some pounded dried cuddies, nettle and sourock and lovage and ramps—and weigh the possibilities for conflict.

He might have come to fetch Gaernath.  That would be vexing, sure, but if his father wanted him, the lad was not hers to command.  It was good of her cousin to let his second son spend so many months so far from his family.  It was good for Gaernath, too.  He did not like his new stepmother, and wandering the hills with the sheep gave him time to come to terms with his changed life.  His wits weren't quick, but he was steady for his years and would make a good sort of man, if given a measure of quiet.  Without him, she would lose sheep; she would have to dig the garden herself . . . though there needn't be so large a garden; there would be fewer hares in the pot of an evening.  A bother, yes, but a bearable one.  Surely her brother didn't think her so dependent on the lad for help or company, not after all the years she had done for herself.

A death in the family?  No, Halladan looked grave, not mournful; and apart from him, she had already lost those who were dear to her.  One brother to strife between kin; another to the same wasting fever that had taken a sister and their mother; Emerwen, a cousin closer than sister who never came home from the moor; their father brought back on a bier after an ill-fated hunt for a malicious boar.  Between her and her surviving, elder sister, there was little love, and Halladan's children, born after she had left the steading for this shore, were names and faces seen but once a year at Yule.  Her brother insisted she return for the holiday, that she not estrange herself completely from her kin, and he rode over to escort her.  To safeguard her on the road, he invariably said; to prevent her from staying comfortably at home, she as invariably contradicted.

Saelon trailed her hands in the cold, swift-flowing water, letting it carry some of her bitterness away.  There was no help for it: she was who she was, and they were who they were, and they did not understand her.  Her thoughts soared above theirs like a falcon over a flight of ravens; her candor slashed and scarred them; her silences disturbed them, almost as much as the sough of the sea.  Closing her eyes, she listened to the distant murmur of surf beneath the chuckle of the burn in its stony bed, and was soothed.  She fretted too much.  It would be better to return to her brother and hear his tale than to distress herself with possibilities.

"I wish," he said as she drew near, gazing wistfully up from the horn, "you would teach Núneth to brew your heather ale."

"I did try," she pointed out, setting down her basket.  Stepping inside to get the pot, so she could fill it at the basin, she added, "Repeatedly."

Halladan grimaced at the memories.  "Perhaps you might have better luck with my girl?"

"You'll send Rian to me?"

His face steeled itself.  "I want you to come home, sister."

The iron of the pot was unmoved by the clenching of her hands.  "Why?"  There was no point in saying this was her home.  He, and the others, could not or would not accept it.  Her resistance wounded him.  She saw it, and his pain wounded her.  But they were old wounds, so often broken open that the passion had long since been retted and stripped, twisted and woven into the bittersweet fabric of the past.

He set the horn down and knotted his sinewy hands together.  "Saelon, please—things are abroad, in the mountains.  Not wolves; not bears.  Beasts are found . . . not only dead, but broken and torn.  And," eyes bleak with the memory of horror, "sometimes their herders, too."

"Who?"

"Drust, from Orleg's steading, and Brandir of Rasgarth."

No kin of theirs, but Brandir she remembered: ruddy of face, hair as black as his cattle, his voice deep yet sweet when raised in song.  He would have stood against whatever attacked his beloved kine.  A shudder passed through her as she remembered the dark tales whispered around the hearth when the little ones were asleep, after Emerwen's disappearance: stories of ancient evil and undying malice, of creatures twisted out of their nature and of stark monsters.  Reaching out to finger the hallowed rowan blossom, she murmured, "Evil from us . . . but Rasgarth is ten leagues from here.  What creature would come so far?"

"Drust was on Hithbrae, six leagues from Rasgarth.  Aniel says there were at least two, larger than a man, going often on two feet, perhaps booted."

Aniel could tell one hind from another by their slot at the edge of a tarn.  If he did not know whether the fell things went barefoot or booted, they must be uncanny.  "That is ill, brother.  Yet why should they come so far for my small flock, when the hills hold cattle and deer aplenty?"

Halladan's eyes were grim under his dark brows, determined that she should not reason herself out of compliance.  "How can we know mere hunger drives such things?  They are evil, and ranging far."

"Evil things shun the sea," she pointed out.

"Can you be sure?" he demanded, scowling at her complacence.  "You risk too much, here alone, with only the lad."

"Yet you rode here alone, over the hills these things haunt, to fetch me?"

"That's different," Halladan replied, but his tone was defensive.

"Yes, it is," she declared.  "You are a husband and a father; the head of our kin and lord of Srathen Brethil.  You put yourself needlessly at risk, when so many depend on you?"

"While you would be no great loss?"

She shrugged.  "You all live well enough without me."

"How can you say so?" he cried, voice rough with anger.

"Easily, given the twenty leagues between us."

He sat staring at her as if she were a stranger.  Turning from him, she set the pot in the basin to fill under the fall of the spring, unmoved.  For she was a stranger to them, as much as if she had married one of their people from far to the east and gone to live among the ruins of their ancient pride.  Yet that he would have understood.  It was natural for a woman to join her husband's folk.  But she had no husband, and so they felt they could still claim her.  Twenty leagues and twenty years had not been enough to loosen their clutch.

Halladan remained silent as she went in, built up the fire with peats, and set the pot onto its tripod, but she felt his gaze on her, sharp as a hawk's.  He had moved to the end of the bench, a dark silhouette framed by the doorway, chin in hands and elbows on knees.  She remembered him sitting so on a great rock overlooking their mother's grave as she was lowered into the ground, a gawky lad trying to come to terms with a cruel world.

He would have to find his own way through, as she had.  She busied herself with supper, taking the grinding cloth and a triple measure of corn from the meal kist.  Spreading the cloth beside the hearth, she set the quern in the middle and poured a handful of grain into the hole in the upper stone.  The slow circular arm-sweep and grumble of the stones calmed her, as the circle of pale flour rose around the edges of the quern.  Looking up through the door, however, she saw him still perched on the bench, like a brooding eagle.  Thinking, in his laborious way, of how he could convince her.  "Why don't you go out after the lad?" she asked, taking pity on him.  "I'm sure he would be glad of the company of a man for a change."

After a long pause, Halladan unfolded himself.  "I expect you're right," he said stiffly.

They looked at each other: he standing tall on the bright green turf, she sitting on the grey-flagged floor in shadow.  "Tell him about the danger," she said.  "If these creatures prey on the herds, he runs the greater risk.  I will not hold him here should he choose to go . . . and there would be two of you on the mountain tracks."

Her brother nodded, then turned and strode away.

So she had peace again, for a while, and all that seethed was the stew.

They returned, man and boy, as the day dimmed towards gloaming, the long gentle twilight of late Lothron.  She heard them long before she saw them—Gaernath's reedy voice babbling as joyously as a spring freshet, Halladan's unexpected laughter, the measured clop of hooves.  Halladan was leading his mare and the lanky, copper-haired lad her dapple pony.  They veered away at the top of the slope, turning toward the larger cave.  Closed off with hurdles, it served as stable and fold for her beasts.  Walking out to look down on the machair, she saw the flock gathered in the near angle and the collie lounging, tongue lolling but alert, beyond them.

By the time Halladan and Gaernath joined her, faces and hands still damp from washing in the burn, she had laid the board: bowls of steaming stew, a platter of bannocks still warm from the griddle, new cheese and butter and honey, ale for the elders and whey for the lad.  As they ate, they talked over the doings of the folk in Srathen Brethil, and Saelon laughed till she wept at Halladan's tale of Hunthor's pied ram tangled in Urwen's new linen.

Leaving them with the last of the ale, she walked slowly down to the machair, milk pail on her arm.  It was one of those perfect spring evenings when the world was fresh and fragrant, its jewel-like colors mellowed as the stars began to bloom overhead in a field of deepest blue.  The small tearing sounds of the grazing sheep and the low sough of the sea beyond the dunes bespoke peace and content . . . .  It was hard not to resent Halladan for breaking in upon it with his rumors of fear.

A wet nose prodded her hand, and she stroked the collie's rough black head, as much to soothe herself as praise the dog.  When she had finished milking the ewes, she gave him the bit of honeyed bannock she'd saved for his treat.  Though it was dark enough that she heard the thump of his tail more than saw it, she had walked the track day and night for a score of years, and easily made her way back to the cliff caves.

Within the rampart of rowan and may, their blossom silver-grey in the starlight, the voices were low and grave.  When she came into the yard, Halladan and Gaernath glanced over, alert; anxious.  She took the covered pail to her pantry, leaving the cream to rise, then busied herself with clearing the board, refusing to be drawn into their fear, thinking rather of what she might serve them tomorrow.  If she set the bere to soak before bed, she could give them a pottage, perhaps with the last of the sloes—

"Aunt," Gaernath began timidly, and she wondered if he were more in awe of her or frightened by Halladan's news, "your brother has told me of the creatures preying on the herds in the hills, and," he seemed to take his courage in his hands, "that you do not choose to return home with him for safety."  An admirable statement of the case; Saelon looked the lad in the face expectantly, to see where he meant to go next.  He seemed daunted by her gaze, but finally managed, "Why not?"

There was hope for the boy yet.  Without looking at Halladan, she replied frankly, "Because I do not believe the danger here is greater than the danger there."

Gaernath considered that, and Saelon left him to it, taking the cheese and butter to their box in the burn and rinsing the bowls in the dark water.  When she returned, she asked, "What do you choose to do?"

"Aunt?"  He looked puzzled and uneasy.

"You are nearly a man, Gaernath.  Soon you will need to make your own decisions, and stand by the consequences.  Just because I choose to stay doesn't mean you must as well."  Taking her shawl from where she had draped it across the may in the heat of the day, she wrapped it around her shoulders, for it had grown chilly as true night finally fell.  "What do you think your father would wish you to do?"

Halladan sat silent, a dark shape whose eyes glimmered, shifting between her and the lad.  Watching to see if she sought to press him one way or another; to see how he would answer.

The boy took time for thought, sobered by the offer of responsibility.  "I think," he finally replied, "my father would not like me to leave my kinwoman alone, if danger was about."

"Very likely," Saelon agreed, with a wry smile.  "Others, though, also have claims on you.  What of your brothers and sisters?"

Again he carefully weighed his answer.  "Mais will care for them, if anything happens to Father."

"True.  Now for a more difficult choice.  If you and I stay, Halladan will ride back alone, through those hills that are so dangerous."

"Oh," he murmured.

"You needn't decide until the morrow," she assured him.  "Or later still, if Halladan decides to stay a while."

"I mustn't," her brother murmured promptly.  "I need to return, in case matters have worsened.  If the weather holds and I leave at dawn, perhaps I will make it home before full night."

She was on the verge of pointing out that would leave him precious little time for sleep, the nights being so short, then recalled that he would probably sleep ill in any case, so near the waves.  "You will have to travel alone then," she told him, shifting the subject to less fraught ground.  "The lad cannot go at such a pace, for all his lightness of foot, and neither can my old garron."

Gaernath looked from one to the other, half-perplexed, half-vexed.  "No, I can't," he admitted reluctantly, but sounding rather as if he'd like to try.

"Then you have until dawn to decide whether to protect your kinswoman, or your lord," Saelon said bluntly.  "In case you should choose your lord, you best get to bed, for you will need your strength for the journey.  Have you fed the collie?"

Stricken with guilt, the lad jumped up.  "I forgot!  Forgive me, Aunt."

"It's the collie who is hungry, not me.  Ask his forgiveness.  And you can sleep with the horses tonight, to whet your wits and rouse early.  I won't be shaking you in your blankets, while Halladan waits."

Halladan shook his head.  "Is she always so harsh, or is she merely trying to drive you away?"

"Harsh?" Gaernath repeated, sounding both surprised and scornful.  "You should share a roof with my father's new lady."

As the lad trotted off to tend to his belated chores, Saelon laid a hand on her brother's shoulder.  "If you will be off so early, you best turn in now."

Placing his hand over hers and pressing it, he asked plaintively, "You will not change your mind?"

She sighed.  "If you give me cause, Halladan.  I will be watchful, but I see no reason to be fearful."

"Mother should have named you Emeldir, as Father wished."

"Would you have me brave, or wise?" she chaffed.

"Both, if you insist on staying at your love's side, so far from your kin.  He is cold, sister, and terrible."

She could hear the echo of those old nightmares in his voice, and wondered if they would visit him tonight.  Dropping a kiss on his dark hair, she softly countered, "And so are you, brother, to those you have earned your wrath."

He shook his head in resignation and stood.  "Show me a bed, so I can get what rest I may."

Saelon gave him hers, good deep heather against weariness, and lit a rushlight at the hearth.  There was much that needed doing before she might seek a bed, though Gaernath's was at hand.

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

 She started awake at the muffled clop of hooves on the turf outside: a single beast; not her dapple.  She had dozed off beside the hearth, where she had sat down to wait out the last dark hour before dawn.  Drawing her shawl more tightly around her against the sapping chill of night's deathgrip, she glanced over at her bed; but Halladan, too, had only just woken, staring in momentary bewilderment at the unfamiliar place.  Rising, she stepped to the door.

"Have I kept Halladan waiting?" Gaernath asked mildly, hitching the saddled roan to the nearest rowan.

Saelon laughed.  "Would you like to come and shake him from his blankets?"

"Did either of you selkies sleep at all?" Halladan grumbled, having slept too much for quickness and too little for restoration.  He ran his fingers through his tousled hair, as if trying to rouse his wits.  "Gaernath—you aren't coming?"

"No, sir," the lad told him gravely.  "If I go and Saelon stays, people will think I am a still a child, running home to _ada_ when frightened.  I will stay, and look after her."

"Indeed?" she challenged, arching an eyebrow.

"Should she be mistaken about the danger," Gaernath added in a rush that very nearly destroyed his maiden dignity.

Halladan shook his head at the pair of them and walked out.

"I thank you for your care, kinsman," Saelon told Gaernath, honoring him with formality, "but you are sure?  Once Halladan has left, you cannot easily change your mind."

He stroked the mare's neck thoughtfully, then nodded.  "I am sure.  There is something about this place . . . .  I do not know if it is the sea, or the rowan, or some lingering influence of the Fair Folk—" his face turned towards the high headland where stones lay in a tumbled ring, the footings, perhaps, of a tower far older than the ruins of Arnor "—but it is hard to imagine evil coming here."  Cocking his head, curious and puzzled, he asked, "Halladan cannot feel that?"

"Halladan and I are descended from the kings of Arthedain, and the blood of Númenor is strong in us," she explained.  "It has brought me a love for the sea, but he is haunted by dreams of the terrible waves that drowned Akallabêth deep.  There is no comfort for him in sight or hearing of the shore."

"Is that why no one else lives here, along the coast?"

"No.  Few now have enough Dúnedain blood for the sea to speak to them so clearly," Saelon sighed.  "No other Men live here because, rightly speaking, we are trespassers.  West of the Lhûn, we are in Lindon, Elven lands.  Yet few of them are left, either, and none have objected to our steadings in the Ered Luin.  I am merely the first who has dared to dwell west of the mountains."

"Have you seen any of the Fair Folk?"  Gaernath's voice was hushed, wondering yet uneasy.

"So, can I hope to break my fast before I go?" Halladan demanded, striding back up from the burn in the grey glim of coming day.  From the look of him, he had ducked his head in the burn.

Stooping, Saelon picked up a small sack from the pile of oddments by the doorway and threw it to him.  "You can eat as you go, if you choose."

"Mmhm," Halladan smiled, weighing it in his hand.  "Roasted hazelnuts?  And still warm."

"And here is the last of the smoked salmon."  She passed him a bulging wallet.  "They will keep you on the road for a long day, but no more.  Let hunger be your spur over the final leagues, and reach home before dark."

"I will do my best," he promised.

"This—" she handed him another wallet "—is linarich, and this—" another, "—carrageen for Urwen, who will know what to do with them.  There are also bags of centaury and stonecrop for her as well.  Please give these pouches of lovage to your lady and my sister, with my blessings."

"Will you be sending your spring clip home with me as well?" Halladan asked dryly.  "Twenty leagues over the mountains is arduous enough, without burdens."

"Burdens," Saelon snorted.  The dried seaweeds and herbs weighed no more than the food she had given him for the road.  "You had best be gone, then, before I find more to lade you with."

Gaernath took the bags and bundles from Halladan and began stowing them in his saddlebags, as Halladan checked his mount and tack.  Satisfied, he clapped the lad on the shoulder.  "Thanks, kinsman.  Look after my sister, if she will let you, and after yourself as well."

"Yes, sir."

"And you," Halladan said, pointing his finger at her.

"Yes?"

He sighed, and stepped over to kiss her hair.  "Be careful."

"Always, brother."  Clasping his hands, she told him, "Go safe."

She and Gaernath stood shoulder to shoulder, watching as he rode down the track, across the machair, and towards the glow that heralded the sun's rise.  She held up her hand in farewell as Halladan turned to look towards the cliffs, and then he disappeared into the folds of the land like an otter among the round-backed swells of the sea.

 * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

Author's Notes

If the English West Midlands, past and pre-Wars-present, were the underlying foundation for Tolkien's Shire, the setting for this story is deeply rooted in the West Highland coast of Scotland.  That dramatic landscape and its little-known antiquities have provided major flavors in my "pot of soup" as I consider what may have happened to some of the scattered remnants of the Dunedain of Arnor.  As Tolkien used philology to ground his Subcreation, I have used archaeology; yet while I love the raw materials, I have not been a slave to them.

For those interested in connecting this storyline with other events in Middle Earth, the action takes place during the mid-29th century of the Third Age, some decades after the Battle of Azanulbizar (T.A. 2799) but before The Fell Winter (T.A. 2911).

Since many of the commonplaces of the West Highland coast may be alien to Southrons or our kin (in blood or spirit) across the seas, I have glossed some words below.  As Tolkien taught me, words have their own unique flavors, which contribute to character and setting in subtle yet powerful ways.  Translations may serve as a bridge, but they are no substitute for a people's own view of their world.

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Chapter 1

**Winkles** (periwinkles; _Littorina littorea_ ); [marine snails](http://www.armofthesea.info/images/animalimgs/cperi_lg.jpg) prized for food, traditionally cooked in soup or stewed in porridge.

**Dulse** ( _Palmaria palmata_ ): [edible seaweed](http://www.marlin.ac.uk/imgs/o_palpal4.jpg), cooked as soup or eaten raw; also used medicinally.

**Wrack** : dried seaweed, or a particular variety of [brown seaweed](http://www.aphotomarine.com/images/seaweed/brown_seaweed_bladder_wrack_fucus_vesiculosus_27-06-10_1.jpg) ( _Fucus_ sp.).

**_Niben naneth_** : Sindarin, "small mother."

**Machair** : Gaelic, coastal plain.

**Whin** (also gorse or furze, _Ulex europaeus_ ): spiny evergreen shrub with bright yellow flowers in May and June.

**Lea** : fallow land, meadow.

**Burn** : Scots, small stream.

**Cove** : recess or small valley in the side of a mountain or between cliffs.

**Rowan** ( _Sorbus aucuparia_ ): small tree with white flowers in May and June, and [bright red berries](http://www.plant-identification.co.uk/images/rosaceae/sorbus-aucuparia-4.jpg) from late summer; although the berries are often eaten, damaging a rowan is taboo, since they are considered a potent protection against evil.

**May** (also hawthorn or whitethorn, _Crataegus monogyna_ ): [small thorny tree](http://www.gardensandplants.com/images/plants/Crataegus%20monogyna.jpg) used for hedges with strongly scented white flowers in May and June.

**Wattle:** [interwoven branches and poles](http://www.louispage.com/Portals/10240/images/wattle%20fence-resized-600.JPG) used for a wide variety of constructions, such as walls and fences.

**Stoup** : Scots, narrow-mouthed pail or bucket.

**Heather ale** : ale flavored with heather flowers and bog myrtle ( _Myrica gale_ ); one of the elements of Highland culture banned after the '45 (the Highland Jacobite rising in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie).  Robert Louis Stevenson's poem about the legend of Pictish heather ale has interesting resonances with Tolkien's story of Mîm the Petty Dwarf—see also Kipling's "A Pict Song" for the folklore view of Picts as a "little" people.  However, there's a problem with the legend: women would have brewed the ale!

**Kist** : Scots, chest.

**Bannock** : Scots, unleavened bread or cake baked on a flat stone or griddle.  Here is a [beremeal bannock](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/BannockBeremeal.jpg), like those Saelon makes.

**Cuddy** (also saithe, _Pollachius virens_ ): fish related to pollack and cod, easily caught with a handline from rocky shores.

**Nettle** ( _Urtica dioica_ ): best known for its stinging leaves, this plant was also used as a potherb when young, for fiber, and medicinally.

**Sourock** (also sorrel, _Rumex acetosa_ ): potherb and salad plant, also used medicinally and for dyeing.

**Lovage** ( _Ligusticum scoticum_ ): celery-like potherb and salad plant.

**Ramps** (also rampsons or wild garlic, _Allium ursinum_ ): potherb, also used medicinally.

**Retted** : part of the process of making linen, where flax is rotted in water to loosen the fiber.  See "flax" in the [Dûnhebaid Dictionary](http://astele.co.uk/stories/chapter_view.cfm?stid=7676&SPOrdinal=1).

**Slot** : track of an animal.

**Tarn** : small mountain lake or pool.

**Srathen Brethil** : compound; Scots Gaelic _srath_ , "strath, valley" (compare Sindarin _rath_ , riverbed) and Sindarin _en-brethil_ , "of the birches."  A glen in the eastern foothills of the Blue Mountains and the westernmost settlement of the Dúnedain, founded by refugees from the fall of Arthedain.

**Corn** : grain, in this case barley.

**Quern** : grinding stones for hand-milling grain; in this case, [a rotary quern](http://www.ydalir.co.uk/gallery/2003/hastings/quern_big.jpg).

**Hurdle** : [panel of wattle](http://www.devondrystonewalls.co.uk/images/hurdle_001.jpg), used for a wide variety of purposes, especially to pen livestock.

**Bere** (hulled six-row barley, _Hordeum distichon_ ): the dominant grain in the Highlands until the medieval period.

**Pottage** : thick porridge.

**Sloe** (also blackthorn, _Prunus spinosa_ ): small thorny tree used for hedges with white flowers March through May; sour fruit used for flavoring and preserves, the flavor is also improved by drying; tough wood valued for making clubs and walking sticks (most notably the Irish _shillelagh_ ).  As whitethorn is considered a benignant tree, blackthorn is considered malignant.

**Garron** : Gaelic, small sturdy packhorse.

**Rushlight** : in this case, an oil lamp whose wick is a dried rush; also rush-wicked candles.

**Selkies** : the Seal-Folk; skin-changers, like Beorn.

**_Ada_** : Sindarin, "daddy."

**Hazel** ( _Corylus avallana_ ): a small tree best known for its nuts (a staple of the Mesolithic diet in northwestern Europe), although its wood was also considered the best for hurdles and shepherd's crooks.

**Linarich** (sea lettuce, _Ulva lactuca_ ; or _Monostroma grevillei_ ): thin green seaweed used medicinally when dried.

**Carrageen** ( _Chondrus crispus_ ): [red-purple seaweed](http://www.biopix.com/photos/jcs-chondrus-crispus-15577.jpg) used as a thickening agent and as food for invalids.

**Centuary** ( _Centaurium erythraea_ ): medicinal herb.

**Stonecrop** (biting stonecrop, also wall pepper; _Sedum acre_ ): medicinal herb.


	2. Rowan and May

The primary goal of this story was to create a narrative space where it would not only be possible but also appropriate for a woman of Men and a (male) Dwarf to become friends.  If one respects the cultural norms of canon--which closely follow those of the early medieval societies whose languages Tolkien studied--there would have been many obstacles to such a relationship.  Due to the sexual division of labor, men and women lived significantly different lives: they spent most of their time in the company of their own gender, and since they did different kinds of work, their topics of conversation didn't overlap much, either.  (What they did have in common were children and other kin, so that was shared ground.)  Protecting one's women and their honor--bluntly, their capacity to produce more of your own kind--from alien and potentially hostile males was very important; Dwarves take this to an extreme, and that cannot but color the way they interact with women of whatever race.  And then there are the very real racial differences between Dwarves and Men, based on the separate creation of Dwarves by Aulë.

Yes, it would have been simpler just to ignore all this, but my aim is Subcreation, not just "fantasy."  Airplanes don't fly because we suspend the law of gravity; airplanes fly because we figure out ways to work around it, and much of the beauty of objects like airplanes come from shaping them so they work in accord with the laws of physics.  I like having something to push against.

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

**Bibliography**

In the creation of this story, I have had the advantage of more than a decade's dedicated research into the Iron Age and Early Medieval British Isles.  Much of the technology and many of the routine, prosaic activities in this story would have been intimately familiar to the ancestors of most of us only a few centuries back.  Since I admire the elegant simplicity--and sustainability--of parts of it, I thought I would share it with you.  It is a very different life from the one we lead today, strongly shaped by the weather, the turn of the seasons, and the rhythms of the creatures people depended on for food and labor.

For those of you with an interest in exploring the reality that underlies this fiction, I include a list of important sources I have used.  Most of these, barring the dictionaries, were written for the general public.  Dickson and Dickson (2000) and Edwards and Ralston (2003) have parts that are more specialized and technical in nature; if anyone would like references to something less challenging, please feel free to drop me a line!

Readers outside the United Kingdom (or even outside Scotland) might have problems finding some of these works, but I encourage people to take advantage of InterLibrary Loan (or your local equivalent).  The Internet has made it easier for librarians to get books to the people who want to read them, and it's cheaper than buying them.

Geology

Baird, W. J.  
  1988  _The Scenery of Scotland: The Structure Beneath_. National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Price, Robert  
  1991  _Highland Landforms_. Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen.

Botany

Beith, Mary  
  1995  _Healing Threads: Traditional Medicines of the Highlands and Islands_. Polygon, Edinburgh.

Dickson, Camilla, and James Dickson  
  2000  _Plants and People in Ancient Scotland_. Tempus Publishing, Stroud, Gloustershire.

Fife, Hugh  
  1994  _Warriors and Guardians: Native Highland Trees_. Argyll Publishing, Glendaruel, Argyll.

Hunting and game

Cummins, John  
  1988  _The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting_. Phoenix Press, London.

Highland culture

Edwards, Kevin J., and Ian B. M. Ralston, eds.  
  2003  _Scotland After the Ice Age: Environment, Archaeology and History, 8000 BC-AD 1000_. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Martin, Angus  
  1987  _Kintyre Country Life_. John Donald Publishers, Edinburgh.

Ross, Anne  
  1976  _The Folklore of the Scottish Highlands_. B. T. Batsford, London.

Languages

Ardalambion  
  n.d.    Sindarin: The Noble Tongue. Electronic document, <http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/sindarin.htm>, accessed August 2006.

Darton, Mike  
  1994  _The Dictionary of Place Names in Scotland, New Edition_. Eric Dobby Publishing, Orpington, Kent.

Maclennan, Malcolm  
1979 [1925]     _A Pronouncing and Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language_.  Acair and Aberdeen University Press, Stornoway, Lewis.

Robinson, Mairi, ed.  
  1985  _The Concise Scots Dictionary_. Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen.

Willis, Didier  
  2001  Sindarin Dictionary. _Hiswelókë_ special issue 1.


	3. Blood on the Heather

_As I was walking all alane,_  
_I heard twa corbies making a mane;_  
_The tane unto the t'other say,  
_ _"Where sall we gang and dine to-day?"_

—Childe ballad 13b

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 Despite the foreboding, it was a kindly summer.  Rain came timely and in due measure; on her small plot, the barley grew tall and green.  As she walked machair and moor, hill and glen, replenishing her stock of herbs, Saelon looked carefully for signs of disturbance, of unease among bird and beast, but saw nothing amiss.  The sea lapped softly as she sat drowsing with her baited line on the warm rocks, and downy goslings cluttered the dooryard.  The only violence was that of swift summer storms: the crash of lightning and, minutes later, rainbows struck from the still-falling drops by the brilliance of the sun.

The lad, however, took his promise to Halladan to heart.  His lack of a weapon vexed and unsettled him, so in the long, mild evenings, he began making a bow.  She sat on the flat rock overlooking the whole bay, carding her wool, while he groped his unskilled way forward, spoiling two staves before remembering the curve needed to give it spring.  A gawky fledgling still, but soon he would be a man.  At Midsummer, she gifted him with a bowstring made from her hair and left him to exercise his wits over the lack of heads for his arrows.

One evening he came swaggering up the track, a red deer calf draped over his shoulders, a blooded hunter at last.  They feasted his success with its tender haunch and a high-day sauce of raspberries and juniper berries, and he had a horn full of heather ale.  They sang the stars down with lays of the great huntsmen—Oromë and his shining steed Nahar, the slaying of Carcharoth, and Argeleb's pursuit of the Black Boar of Rhudaur—and the lad seemed to grow half a span in the space of a night.

As Urui wore on, she began to think she had encouraged him overmuch.  Twice, when she traipsed to where the sheep grazed to bring him a bite, she found them alone but for the collie.  He looked at her quizzically, but had tended the flock so for many years before the lad came, and Saelon worried more about Gaernath than the beasts.  The lad always brought them in dutifully at day's end, but he must be roving in search of game.  After his initial triumph, there had only been a couple of brace of grouse.  Yet they were coming to the season when the stags would begin to roar in the hills, calling the hinds to them and dueling for their favor.  No hunter could not feel the pull of those cries, the distraction of the antler-crowned king of the chase.

She was working in the garden early in Ivanneth when the beat of hooves caught her ear, down on the machair.  Who—?  Straightening, she strode to the edge of the cliff-shelf and gazed out over the plain, fearing to see a rider from Srathen Brethil with ill news.

It was Gaernath, low on the dapple's neck, switching the beast to keep it at a canter.  For a moment, she thought he was larking, and her mouth set.  Stalking the deer when he should be herding; racing her poor old garron . . . perhaps it was time he went home to his father.

Just as she turned back towards her work, she realized he was flogging the beast with his precious bow.

She ran down the track to meet him, and caught the garron's halter as they slid in a tight turn.  The beast was lathered and blowing, the lad's eyes as wild as the pony's.  "Dead!" Gaernath cried, hands knotted in the black mane.  "Blood—"

"Who?" Saelon demanded.  "Where?"

He threw a trembling arm back the way he came, pointing north and somewhat east.  "The myrtle moor, near the foot of the bald hill.  Three—"  The gush of words halted, and he drew breath as if fighting a rising gorge.

Taking his arm, she drew him off the garron.  "Steady," she murmured, her arm around his shoulders.  "Three what?  People?  Beasts?"

"People," he replied, shuddering.  "But not our kind."

Saelon stared.  "Not the Fair Folk?"

"No."  The lad gave a short shake of his head.  He was trying to collect himself.  "Dwarves, I think, though I have never seen one before."

Very ill, but somehow less fearful than the slaying of Elves.  She knew that there had been Dwarves in the mountains since the Elder Days; twice they had come to Srathen Brethil during her youth to trade.  Yet she had seen none here, so close to the sea.  "Was it a fresh kill?"

"What?"

"Was the blood bright, or dull and dry?"  The lad continued to stare at her, appalled.  "Had they been slain by day or night?  When does the killer walk?" she demanded, when he remained mute.

Gaernath looked inward and balked.  "There were birds."

Saelon glanced up to judge the time.  The days were shortening quickly now, but it was not long past noon.  It was at least a league to the moor—the lad was wandering further than she had guessed—but the dead might tell them much that was needful to know.  The lad was shaken to his soul: he had not read the signs, or could not bear to remember them.

She stroked the dapple's nose.  He had caught his breath and was watching them, head high; not too tired.  "Take me there," she told Gaernath, mounting.

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 It was the season of heather.  The hills were cloaked in rich purple and russet, but the clouds were drawing a blanket of grey across the sky.  That promised rain, settled rain.  Saelon kept the dapple at a brisk trot, and the lad loped alongside.

Let him run, run himself to exhaustion.  He might not sleep, else.

The myrtle moor was a pocket of bog tucked between three rounded hills and a ridge of gravel and cobbles that cut off the sea.  She often came here for the plants that did not grow on the drier skirt of the land along the shore: myrtle and orchids, butterwort and moss.  Gaernath skirted the southern edge, going more slowly now, picking his way among the hummocks and looking up frequently to orient himself by the peaks inland.  Thickets of myrtle and bearberry and cowberry crowned the hillocks, and mires lurked in the hollows, flecked white with canach, where the garron might bog down.

She knew they had reached the place when he crested a higher hump and stood stock-still.  "There."  He pointed onward.

At the sound of his voice, a pair of corbies rose, protesting the intrusion.  Odd that there were only two.  Saelon slid off the dapple's back and held out the reins to the lad.  "Wait here," she told him, though it was plain he would go no closer unless ordered, and he came down gladly.

From the crest you could see a flatter place just beyond the next thicket, a patch of green turf with a spot of blue unnatural in this place, a crumpled hood.  As she wove her way through the myrtle stems, a raven beat its wide wings and took to the air, giving a deep, bell-like cry.  Perhaps that was what had daunted the corbies, though it was also odd to find a lone raven at this season.  The oddness troubled her: if the killer was unnatural, would not birds shun its haunts?  Foreboding was heavy on her as she thrust through a last screen of leaves and looked down on the narrow level of turf.

They had died fighting.

Dwarves they were, clad for a journey rather than a battle; though their weapons lay near to hand, black blood staining the bright blades, they bore neither helm nor mail.  And no blade had shed their blood.  Saelon had thought herself hard, inured to wounds and gore . . . but this was terrible.  One had been broken as a man might rend a roasted fowl, the one part paces from the other.  Another lay headless.  Their gore had painted the grass brown, like the blight of an early frost.

And here and there were patches of black, the blood of something else.

She found she had sunk to her knees, hands pressed against her mouth.  Not against carrion-reek: they had been dead some time, but not long enough for that in this weather.  It was the stark bestial savagery of the attack—malice beyond reason, or mindlessness.

This was what had brought Halladan so near the sea, to warn her of such a threat.  Truly, an awful thing, and her blood ran cold.

Forcing her mind to practicalities, she clambered to her feet and moved closer.  The third Dwarf lay a little way off, as if he had been flung aside like a child's dolly, one leg unnaturally bent.  The least gruesome, Saelon went to him first, heaving him over to look on his face.  They would have kin, somewhere, and she wondered how she might get news to them.

He gave a rattling groan as he settled onto his back.

Staring incredulously at his slack face, she laid a hand on his breast.  He breathed; his heart beat.  He was alive!  "Gaernath!" she shouted, standing.  "Gaernath, bring the garron—one still lives!"

Lad and beast came, both skittish in the presence of so much blood.  Taking the reins, she tied them firmly to the nearest shrub.  "Take your cloak," she ordered, "and get as much moss as you can: wringing wet, without mud.  Understand?"

"Yes, aunt."  He was bewildered, far out of his understanding, and gladly fled to do as she bid.

When he had gone, Saelon stared at the carnage around her, trying to order her thoughts, shrill and whirling as fleeing plovers.  So much ought to be done, yet there were only the two of them and a single beast, and the sun halfway down the sky.  In her bones, she felt this thing came by night.  It was out there somewhere, not far off, wounded and perhaps hot with malice.  Woe to them if they did not come to shelter before dark.

Woe to them in any case, perhaps.

She gathered the weapons and took such of their gear as would help keep the burden on the garron.  As she stripped the belt from the headless body, there came the harsh croak of a raven.  The bird had come back and sat in the thicket, watching her with its dark eyes.  Impatient to return to its meal, no doubt.  Yet when she turned back to her grim task, she noticed that, rent as the bodies were, they had not been torn by the beaks of birds.

What were they doing here, then?  She looked around and spotted the corbies a little further off on the other side of the level, glancing uneasily between her and something on the ground near the mire.  She walked over to look, prepared for horrors.

It might have been a hand, or it might have been a sort of paw; the birds had stripped it to bone where they could worry aside the tough dun hide.  It had ragged claws almost the length of her fingers, dark with blood and filth, and it was far larger than the hand of any Man, or Dwarf.  The heavy bone had been cut cleanly—a mighty stroke.

She could not bring herself to touch it.  Let the corbies have it.

Gaernath came back with his awkward, dripping burden and between the two of them they wrestled the wounded Dwarf onto the dapple's broad back, for all his sidling and snorting.  Once they had hung the weapons and moss on him as well, they turned their backs on the dire place and plodded homewards, their heads bent beneath the rain that began to fall in thick sheets from the louring sky.

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 An early dusk was coming down as Saelon urged the weary garron up the track to the caves, drenched to the skin, chilled in bone and heart.  She had sent Gaernath off when they reached the machair, charged to fetch his abandoned flock and milk them before full dark.  The running would warm him, and it would be good to keep him away while she first tended the Dwarf.  Saelon wondered if he still lived: laying wounded a night and a day without succor, and such a ride in such weather would have killed all but the strongest of Men, but it was said Dwarves were the hardiest of the Free Peoples, enduring as their mountain homes.  If so, she had a long night, perhaps many long nights, before her.

Wrenching a hurdle from the garden fence, she lowered him onto it as carefully as she could, favoring his damaged leg.  He still breathed, but with a harsh rasp that boded ill.  Saelon dragged the hurdle under the shelter of the cliff eave, then ducked into the cave.  She stirred the dying embers of the fire to life and heaped it with peats; grabbed the larger pot and set it under the spring to fill before leading the dapple to his stable.

Horsetails in the large pot for the Dwarf's wounds; the smaller pot to give Gaernath and herself something hot.  On the bench, she set out cheese and some of the dried venison for the lad; she ate some as well, but tasted nothing.  What else would she need?  All-heal and goldenrod, orchid root and meadowsweet; butter; moss and linen; something to splint and pad the twisted leg; candles for clear light.  When all was ready, she brought the hurdle in, set it down by the fire, and looked at her patient.

Like all Dwarves, he was broad and brawny, with a long chestnut beard.  Drawing off his russet hood, she found bright copper ringing his braided hair and caked blood where his scalp had been scraped almost raw.  His thick, labored breathing suggested a broken skull, but it felt sound beneath her gingerly probing fingers.  There was little she could do there.  Blunt, dirty claws—the half-eaten hand came back to mind—had grazed the side of his lined face and clutched deep in his shoulder.  Ugly wounds, and they had sat for near a day.  The rain had saved her the trouble of soaking his clothes to peel them away; good wool and linen, but with shreds missing at the tears . . . in the wound, no doubt.

Saelon had heard that Dwarves grew from stone and returned to stone at death, but his pale, clammy flesh felt no different from a Man's under her hands as she washed it clean, laying a salve of all-heal and goldenrod on the lesser hurts.  She would return to the shoulder later.  Bad as it was, the leg—twisted, white bone jutting from the shin—might be worse.

She had cut off his trews and sluiced the bits of heather and turf from the naked bone when Gaernath came in.  He looked like a half-drowned whelp, shivering and drooping as he set the pail by the door.  "Here is the milk, aunt."

"Drink as much of it as you like," she told him.  "I have set some supper on the bench for you, but you might see to the dapple first.  Water him at the burn, and give him a measure of beans and an armload of the new hay.  When you are both fed, come back—I will need your help setting this leg."

Gaernath looked mutely on the wounded Dwarf; perhaps he still saw the blood that she and the rain had washed away.  "Yes, aunt."  He was not gone long, however; little longer than it would have taken to tend the beast.

"Come," Saelon said gently.  "Take his shoulders and hold him steady."

With the lad as an anchor, she carefully straightened the leg, realigning the knee and broken bones as well as she could, glad that her patient was limp and senseless.  "Thank you."  Laying a hand on the lad's shoulder, she advised, "Make yourself a posset and get into dry clothes.  I do not want you falling ill."

Nodding, he rose and went to his kist.  He came back to the fire with his cup, dressed in some of his warmest clothes, an oiled cloak around his shoulders.  Saelon looked up from splinting the leg and frowned in puzzled worry.  "Are you so cold?"

He knelt by the hearth, dropping one of the boiling stones into the milky ale.  It hissed, raising fragrant steam.  "Someone must keep watch, and you must tend him."

His courage almost brought tears to her eyes, and she smiled on him with wan, grim pride.  "Take one of the axes," she urged him.  "The geese should warn us if anything comes up the track, but call if anything is amiss."

Tossing off the posset in one draught, he set the cup down and met her gaze.  "This is what Halladan warned us of, isn't it?"

"I do not know what else it could be."

Gaernath turned his gaze to the Dwarf.  "Perhaps he can tell us what it is."

"Perhaps."

Saelon stepped out with him to refill the large pot.  It was black now, a dreary night.  Rain poured down beyond the cliff, and gusts of wind threw spray even into the cave's mouth.  Across the machair and dunes, the surf muttered angrily.  It was almost a relief to step back inside, even given what awaited her.

While the pot heated, she trickled a thin stream of warmed water between the Dwarf's dry lips, and was heartened when he swallowed.  Broken heads were chancy; but if they could not swallow, there was no hope.  She allowed herself a posset and changed into a dry gown, pinning her old, thick shawl closely on her breast before coming back to the shoulder.

She probed with a long bone needle, to gauge the damage and trying to draw out the filth and shreds of cloth.  It looked as if he had been facing the _raug_ when it seized him: there were three ragged wounds in his back, so deep that two touched his shoulder bone, and one in the front, under his collar bone and running upwards, thankfully missing his lung.  There was no way she could clean them properly as they were, and there was already a whiff of mortification.  The only thing she knew that might help was to lay them open and cauterize them . . . but could he bear further wounding, the loss of yet more blood?

Laying a hand on his breast, she could feel his heart beat, strong and even; his breath, though rasping, was steady.  If it had to be done, now was the time to do it—in his stupor, he would feel nothing.  She boiled her best knife and set the worst in the fire; when it was red-hot, she hardened her heart and coldly cut him until the blood flowed and she could wash out the poison; laid on the burning blade, grimacing at the stench of seared flesh.  Only when all were done did she poultice them well with orchid root.

Then began the hard work of nursing: hours of watchfulness and small attentions, reading the signs of improvement or decline to aid him as she could in his battle against death.

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 A light touch on her shoulder woke her.  "How does he?" Gaernath asked quietly, placing another peat on the fire.

Saelon scrubbed her face with her hands and yawned as if to split her head.  There had been little change in the night, except for rising fever, and when he had made it through the dangerous hours just before dawn, she allowed herself to doze.  She watched the rise and fall of the Dwarf's chest, and laid her hand on his forehead.  "No worse."

"It will be another wet day," the lad reported, then passed her the milk pail.  From the heft, he had been down to the flock already.

"Have you slept?" she asked.

His face closed.  "A little."

She had forgotten that he had set himself the task of night guard.  "Then take your rest now.  I suppose you are hungry."

"There is plenty of venison," he said dismissively.

"Hardly plenty, and you need more than that," she sighed, and climbed to her feet, stiff after a night on the flagged floor.  "Get to bed; I'll wake you for some proper breakfast in a while."

He went to his bed, but she could hear him toss and turn below the grumble of quern.  If he had not been so composed this morning, she would have thought him too haunted for sleep; instead, she suspected that he had slept more of the night than he would admit.  She was unwilling to have him fidgeting about all day . . . and there was something else that badly needed doing.  So when he finished his fourth bannock after a steaming bowl of pottage, she sighed.  "I suppose you will sleep the rest of the day, the better to watch tonight?"

"A part of the day," he allowed.  "I thought I might take a line and see if I can catch some fish.  Fish would be good for an invalid, wouldn't it?"

He was not adverse to going out into the wet, then.  Good.  "When he wakens, perhaps.  If you are not weary, though, there is something we have neglected."

"What?"

Saelon looked to the Dwarf.  "His companions lie on the moor, carrion for bird and beast.  That is not right."  Meeting the lad's eyes, she said, "Will you go back, and raise a cairn over them?"

"Go back?" he protested, and his voice was almost shrill when he added, "Alone?"

"Would it be worse than last night?"

He opened his mouth, then shut it again.

"The rain will have washed the blood away," she pointed out.

At that he flushed scarlet, ashamed of yesterday's squeamish terror.  "May I take the dapple?" he asked.

"Of course.  It would be easier to move the bodies to the ridge, where there will be plenty of stones, than haul the stones to where they died."

Gaernath considered.  "They are not Men, aunt."

"No, they are not," she agreed.  "Yet they are also Children, and we hear that they go to great lengths to recover their fallen.  If we were to die here, far from our kin, would your father wish that a passing stranger might keep the corbies from you?"  Rising, she gathered the bowls and cups—last night's as well as the morning's—and went out to wash them in the burn.

The rain had slackened, but she lifted her face to the grey sky, welcoming its cool kiss on her drawn face.  Once the dishes were clean, she ducked her head in the chill, rushing water, shocking her wits into sharpness and washing the sweat of her own fear away.

The lad met her at the door.  He was wearing his oiled cloak and carrying the dwarven bow.  "I am going to the moor," he told her, and kissed her brow.  "I will be back before dark."

"Else I will come looking for you," she threatened.  "Be wary, and don't stray after the deer."

She stood on the flat rock, her shawl over her head, and watched him ride away, his dark cloak and the dapple's hide fading into the mist.  It was her fate, it seemed, to send her kinsmen from her, out to the hills where fell things prowled.  She wondered if Halladan had come safe home, and whether anyone would have sent to tell her if he had not.  Was there some dwarf-woman waiting now for the return of her men?  If so, would she ever learn their fate?

Pulling the wool closer around her throat, Saelon went back to her charge.

 * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

Notes

**Corbie** ( _Corvus corone_ ): carrion crow.

**Canach** (common cottongrass; _Eriophorum angustifolium_ ): [a sedge with fluffy white seedheads](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1076/650152930_fae32c4c3c.jpg).

**Horsetails** ( _Equisetum arvense_ ): a [water plant](http://www.inetours.com/images/Snglimgs/SABG/Horsetails.jpg) use for scouring pots and medicinally.

**All-heal** (also self-heal; _Prunella vulgaris_ ): medicinal herb.

**Goldenrod** ( _Solidago virgaura_ ): medicinal herb.

**Orchid** (early spotted orchid; _Orchis maculata_ ): medicinal herb, root used to cleanse infected wounds.

**Meadowsweet** (also queen of the meadow; _Filipendula ulmaria_ ): medicinal herb used to treat fever; original source of salicylic acid for aspirin.

**Moss** ( _Sphagnum cymbifolium_ ): highly absorbant, mildly antiseptic [bog plant](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_kLXfvlPxyPs/S99Kpbh9SpI/AAAAAAAABBQ/fK42Fr0tcMI/s1600/DSC_0079.2.jpg) used for wound dressings as late as World War II.  It was also traditionally used for menstrual pads and nappies.

**Posset** : a hot, rich drink for those who have been chilled or invalids, made of sweetened milk or cream curdled with ale (or wine).

**Boiling stones** : a quick low-tech way to heat liquids is to put a fire-heated stone into the container.  This is how people boiled food before they had ceramic or metal pots.

**_Raug_** : Sindarin, "demon."  Compare Old English _scynscaþa_ , "demonic foe," in _Beowulf_.


	4. Hammer and Tongs

_He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse._  
_The curs of the day come and torment him_  
_At distance, no one but death the redeemer with humble that head,_  
_The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes._  
_The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those_  
_That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant._  
_You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;_  
_Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;  
_ _Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him._

 —Robinson Jeffers, "Hurt Hawks"

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

 Pain, and the sweet smell of limestone.

The pain ran through his body like ore through rock . . . yet it was the hot throb of flesh and bone reforging themselves, not the sharp shrillness of fresh wounds.  How . . . ?  They had crossed the moraine-ridge as dusk fell, Vestri determined to celebrate their find with venison—

There memory ended, like a tunnel blocked by roof fall.  He strove briefly to push through, but his head clunked like a flawed casting.  Something simpler.

Where was he?

A cave.  Small, open or nearly so.  His raw, irritable senses caught the muffled rustle of the wind, and faint echoes off naked stone around him.  Inhabited: the earthy scent of peat smoke, damp wool, and an aroma of broth that made his stomach wring with hunger.

Faint, but ominous, the stink of foul wounds.  His?

There had been a woman of Men, soft-voiced and gentle-handed, with cool, thirst-slaking water.  Had he roused twice?  Thrice?

He opened his eyes.  There was little light, which was kind to his sore head.  He lay on a thick bed of fresh-cut heather, about a pace from a rough-kerbed hearth where the peat fire glowed dully, mantled in its own ash.  The light came from a fat candle set atop a well-carven chest, and the woman sat with her back against it, hands clasped around one bent knee.  She was dozing, her chin on her breast and her face in shadow, a thick braid of dark hair over one shoulder.

A woman of Men.  There were no Men this side of the mountains.  Where was he?  Limestone, with caves . . . .  None in the Blue Mountains themselves, or for many leagues to the east; that belt along the coast down in Forlindon, Elf-country, but those were sea-caves, awash in storm and tide; and . . . another place.  Where was it?

Another blocked passage in his mind.  He went to lift a hand to his head, but the pain in his shoulder bit like a warg and he halted with a grim hiss.

The woman's head jerked up quick as a guilty sentinel's, and she stared blankly at him.  For several breaths they looked on each other across the chasm of strangeness.  "Are you thirsty?" she asked, hardly more than a whisper.

"Yes."  The harshness of his voice, rusted by disuse, surprised him, but not more than his weakness.  She helped raise him with a carefully placed arm and held a cup to his lips.  The draught was cool, tasting of honey and bitter herbs.  "Thank you," he rasped with such courtesy and dignity as he could find, once she had eased him back down.

"How is your head?  Can you bear the light?"

"Well enough.  Where am I, and how did I come here?"

She brought the candle between them, gazing at his eyes in the brighter light.  Hers was a lean, strong face with good bone, bronzed by sun and wind, and her eyes were a curious color that seemed to shift with the candle's flame, grey or green or blue, like a fine sea-beryl.  Or perhaps that was the fault of his dunted head.

Whatever she saw satisfied her, and she laid the backs of her fingers briefly on his brow.  "I do not know what you might call this place.  It is a goodly bay, with rich machair and old sea cliffs high above the plain.  The ruin of a very ancient tower lies tumbled on the height of the southern headland."

He felt he ought to know such a place, but could not call it to mind.  Along the coast, at least.  "Go on," he prompted, as she turned away to fill a shallow bowl from the pot.

"You should take some broth and sleep again," was her reply.  When he scowled, she added, "You have been senseless at least two days, I guess three, and there is still much fever."

Three days?  "My companions—"

Her face, already somber, grew grave, and she gazed on him long.  "I am sorry.  They were dead when we found you.  My kinsman has raised a cairn over them so they may lie in peace."

Rage burned away both pain and weakness.  He sat bolt upright, though there was a tremor like the warning note of a cracked anvil in his head.  "Who has done this?"

She caught his shoulders, trying to press him back down.  "Lie down, or you will finish their work.  You can go nowhere on that leg.  Lie down!"

"Tell me," he demanded, "and I will consider it."

They hung there, locked in opposition, eye to eye and will on will, while she considered it.  "I will tell you the little I know," she conceded, "but please, lie back.  You are sorely wounded, and it is a wonder you are not dead yourself."

"Begin," he growled.

"We had news before the summer of fell things attacking beasts and herdsmen across the mountains.  My kinsman came across you while hunting.  There was blood on your weapons, black and rank, and what might have been a clawed hand.  Whatever attacked you did not escaped unscathed.  Now," she set a hand on his breast and leaned into him, "you are still very ill.  If you wish to avenge your loss, you will need your strength."

Wroth though his heart was, he could feel the truth in her words and let her press him back down.  "What is your name?" he asked, as she checked the wrappings on his wounds.

"Saelon."

Just the one; no clue to her kin.  "I am Veylin, son of Vali, at your service."

"And at yours."  Brusque she might be, but not uncourteous, and kind to the needy stranger.  He should be grateful; but after the broth, spent by the burst of anger and sapped by grief, he slid back into the darkness of sleep.

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

 When Veylin woke again, his head was clearer but his heart was bleak.  Thekk and Vestri were dead.  For a time he lay there, mourning them; then his thoughts turned to his duty.  Word must go to their kin, so the hunt could set out before their killer's trail grew too cold.  Opening his eyes to the soft light of outside day, he considered his splinted leg and flexed his foot by way of trial.

Bone grated on bone, and something shifted in the knee where all should be knit together.  Truly, he would not be going anywhere on it soon.

He looked around in the better light, therefore, with greater attention.  The cave was small, hardly ten paces across and deep, and sea-carved, its roof a natural ogive.  Panels of loosely-woven wattle had been set across the mouth, leaving the point open as window and chimney.  Heather had been lashed to more than half, as if someone was thatching a wall instead of a roof—crude work, which would keep out naught but the weather, and that for little more than a season.  Were they capable of no better?

Men, he reflected, did not house in caverns by choice, but by necessity.  Was this the broken remnant of some steading that had fled as far as the land ran, or a band of outlaws?  If the latter, they had picked a poor place for their den—no folk of any kind dwelt along this stretch of the coast.  Yet there were signs of past prosperity.  Though the furnishings were spare and simple, there were some fine pieces: the larger chest, the box bed in a sheltered niche.  If he could get a closer look at their carving, he might be able to place them.

Just outside the open doorway, he heard Saelon's voice, low and reassuring, and she came in, carrying a stoup and followed by a slim figure a good span taller than herself.  Glancing his way, she canted her head like a falcon.  "How is your head this morning?"

"Mending," he answered gruffly.  Her gaze was disconcertingly keen, and suspicion had crept into his heart.  Straitened folk might think to take gratitude rather than hope for it.  And he had naught but her word for how he had come here.

"Here is my kinsman," she told him, "Gaernath.  He it was who found you."

Veylin stared.  Gaernath was the merest stripling, without even down on his cheek, though his ill-tamed mane put molten copper to shame.  The child stared back, clearly unsettled.  By danger so near or an ill conscience?  His first sight of grave wounds or a Dwarf?  An alloy of some or all?  Having set the stoup down, Saelon bumped him with her shoulder, and he started.  "I am sorry I could do no more, Master Veylin."

Little grace, but with the glimmer of courtesy beneath the unpolished surface.  "At your service," Veylin replied punctiliously, concealing his doubts.  "I am thankful for so much.  Sit beside me," he asked, "and tell me all you can."

As the child told his tale, hesitantly at first, Saelon brought them both bowls of pottage, topped with brambleberries and cream, and left the cave.  Gaernath gazed after her for a moment like an abandoned waif, then collected himself and, with unpracticed hands, helped the Dwarf to a position where he could manage the spoon for himself.  "I'm sorry," he said again, as Veylin bit back a grunt.

"Go on," Veylin grated.  His left arm was of little use, but dependence galled more than the pain.

Gaernath ate with the wolfish avidity of youth between snatches of his story, his awkwardness lessening, but when he came to the place of death, his spoon faltered.  What he had to tell was gruesome, and he paused often; the sick horror on that fresh face made Veylin's heart burn white-hot.  "Your pardon," he rumbled when the boy shoved his nearly empty bowl aside.  "This is no subject for the table."

"No," Gaernath replied after a longer pause.  "You need to know what happened to your friends, and perhaps you can advise me afterwards.  I must not be a child."  Yet he was silent before he went on again, and by the time he finished describing how he had taken the broken bodies of Vestri and Thekk from the moor to the ridge—alone, for Saelon had been nursing Veylin—and piled stones high to guard them, his voice was shaking.

Though it cost him dear in pain, Veylin reached up and laid a hand on his slender shoulder.  "I thank you for your care of my kin."  It was impossible to doubt such a tale, from such lips.

The boy gave his head a quick shake of dismissal.  "Thank my aunt, for she ordered all.  I knew not what to do.  I still don't, yet her brother, my lord, charged me to look after her.  Do you have any counsel to give me?"

Veylin had much to say, but not to this brave child, already so near the edge of his heart's strength.  "Let me think on it.  Who is your lord?"

"Halladan of Srathen Brethil."

One of the shards of the Dúnedain of Arnor, shattered and scattered across so much of Eriador; a remnant of the nobility of Arthedain.  A fair-handed folk, though less friendly—less prosperous—than their fathers.  What were the woman and boy doing so far from that valley and their kin?

Saelon returned, a covered pail on her arm, and Gaernath sprang to his feet.  "I must take the flock to pasture.  Rest well, till I see you this evening."

"Did you ask leave for the bow?" Saelon asked.  At the shake of his head, she said, "Bring their gear."

"Yes, aunt."

As she moved around the cave, tending to her housekeeping, Veylin watched her, trying to read the puzzle.  He knew little of the womenfolk of Men, save that Men seemed to hold them in little regard.  Indeed, they often treated them as chattels.  Yet this one was ready-handed, masterful beneath her complaisance.

Gaernath came back, laden with arms and leather.  "Here is what we brought away."

Vestri's bow and quiver; Thekk's axe, and his own; their belts and pouches.  They brought his companions' deaths back to him, and he reached out to touch them as the boy laid them down, grieving for the hands that would hold them no more.  Thekk's axe still bore the blood of their killer: black, as Saelon had said, with a cloying reek unlike any Veylin knew.  Musky: not goblin; not troll.

His axe had been cleaned, but carelessly.  There was still a line of black where the head met the helve, assurance that he, too, had hurt the thing.  Wrapping his hands around the silken ash brought him a measure of comfort, a promise of vengeance merely delayed.

"We have no weapons," Gaernath told him, "so I have sat with that one during night guard.  During the day, I have taken the bow with me."

"This is mine," Veylin said, setting his axe aside.  "But take the bow as your own—" he handed it to the crouching boy "—as a first payment of debt.  His name was Vestri," he sighed: hardly more than a beardling himself, delighted to be hunting the gems he loved so well.

"The bow?"  Gaernath was so caught between astonishment and joy—his hands fairly caressed the curves of yew—that he was bewildered.

"The bow was Vestri's."

That reminder of death sobered him.  "Did he wear the blue hood or the green?"

Let him put a face to the gift, to honor the slain and keep the enemy's malice in his mind.  "Blue."

Gaernath bowed.  "Thank you.  I will remember your friend."

"Go now," Veylin said, wearied by so much talk and movement.  "Take care, boy."

As he lay back, Saelon met the boy at the doorway, handing him a packet of food.  "Some fresh meat would be very welcome," she told him, "but do not stray.  A sheep I can spare, but not you."

"Yes, aunt."

She stood in the doorway for a long time, watching him go, but when she turned back into the cave, her face was placid.  Filling a bowl with warmed water, she brought it and a cloth to Veylin's side.  "Shall I tend your wounds?"

"As you wish," he grumbled, bitter resentment welling up at his helplessness, the indignities of being nursed.  He kept his silence while she tended his shoulder, unflinching under the pain that fed his dark mood, but when she had helped turn him and began unwrapping his leg, the calmness of her mien struck fire from him.  "Are there no others here?" he asked curtly.  "No men?"

"No."

Veylin glowered at her, angered by her unconcern.  "Are you mad or a fool?  What chance do you and that child have, if those fell things come to this defenseless place?"

"Little, perhaps.  Yet you are not fit to travel."  Drawing back the dressings so he could see for himself, she asked, "Would you have us abandon you?"

He blanched at the sight: from the thigh down, hammered flesh just beginning to leach from angry purple to a sickly yellow-brown; the clotted, ugly shin; and worse, the subtle wrongness of line, like a badly twisted shaft that had not come straight again.  The only other time he had seen such damage, an axe had been put in the fire.

He raised his eyes to meet Saelon's, and now he saw her coolness as that of a warrior facing daunting odds.  "It might be wise."

Her dark brows lifted and one corner of her mouth flicked in grim humor.  "If there was any sure refuge within a day's march, it might be.  Or if your kin would not resent it."

Veylin grunted.  Mad she might well be, but not a fool.  Oddi had some idea of where they had meant to go, and when they were gone overlong, there would be a search.  But that was like to be weeks from now.

Saelon laid a hand on his good ankle.  "In any case," she said with what sounded like lightness, "I would cheat such a _raug_ of a victim if I could.  We must trust to our fates for now, and the ward of sea and rowan, slender though they may be."

Aye, she was Dúnedain , putting her hope in waves and a white tree.  He would be happier if there was a good stone wall across the mouth of the cave, and a stout, iron-banded door between them and this thing that walked at night.  Yet having his axe to hand was something, too.

"I have some skill at healing," Saelon told him as she washed his wound clean, "but I have never treated a Dwarf before.  Is there aught I should know?"

He knew nothing of Men's art in such things.  "I have no complaints.  We are hard to kill, but—" Veylin surveyed his leg with dour gloom "—that looks broken beyond mending.  If I were among Dwarves, we would have it off."

"It may come to that."  She felt his calf with the careful attention of a good craftsman, making small adjustments to the alignment of the bone.  Veylin set his teeth on the pain.  "Still, the fever and corruption are less.  I remember my grandmother tending a leg nearly this bad.  She saved it and the man, though he was lame lifelong."

A bleak prospect, but no worse than a peg.  "You have my leave to try."

"You must stay off it," she warned.  "Weeks, perhaps months."

"If we live so long, I will fret about it then."

That glint came back to her eye, one fatalist appreciating another.  "Then I will begin considering how best to humor a fretful Dwarf.  But now you should rest, or your fever may worsen.  You have talked and done more than you should this morning."

Very likely, but his mind was less troubled than it had been, though his heart was no lighter, and his rest was more like sleep and less like stupor.  He dozed and woke, usually to find Saelon near to hand, looking up from some task to see if he needed anything, then dozed again.

The westering sun was streaming in through the open arch, golden and warm, when he woke and reached for the cup Saelon had left within reach.  "Do you need aught else?" she asked from the doorway, a spindle in her hands.

"No."

Rising, she laid her wool aside and stepped in to lift a laden basket.  "Then I have chores that must take me outside for a while.  You do not mind being left alone?  I doubt I will be within call."

"Go," he urged.  "I would not be a fetter.  One of us pinned by the leg is already too many."

Saelon smiled as she set the basket on her hip.  "I will not be long."

Veylin listened to her retreating footsteps, though he could not hear them for long.  There must be turf a short way outside.  The only other sound was the mild gabble of amiable geese.  Ah, so they did not rely on the boy alone for an alarm by night.  Having been hounded by the birds in many Men's yards, he knew their worth as doorwards.

When the geese had been silent for a while, he twisted around to reach for the gear Saelon had moved aside from his bed, ignoring his shoulder's protest, and groped his belt and pouch from the pile.  The leather was stiff with blood in places, but his beard had shielded the pouch.

The secret knot he used to secure it was snug, undisturbed, and Veylin gave a sigh of satisfaction.  It would have been unpleasant to find his hosts were thieves, particularly when he was unable to leave them.  A couple of sharp tugs and the tie came free; with an effort he tipped the pouch's contents into his good hand.

In the streaming sunlight, the raw fire opals glittered, bright sparks of red and orange and gold half-hidden beneath their dull surface.  The largest was as big as the end of his thumb, and from what he could see its fire was superb.  If it polished up well, he did not think he would be able to part with it.  The smaller ones were nearly as fine, however, and he should be able to ask his own price for them.

He still did not remember what happened after the three of them crossed the moraine, but he could see the dyke where he had found these as plainly as his own chambers in Sulûnduban, running across the writhen schists and out into the surf.  There were more there, and cinnabar, too.  He even had hopes of finding beryls nearby; the rock had smelt and tasted right.

For a while longer he gazed on them, warming his heart at their bright beauty, but as the sun sank, they lost the light and their splendour was muted.  With a reluctant hand, he tipped them back into the pouch.  Retying the knot was a struggle, with his left arm so lame, but he finally snugged it down and stowed belt and pouch beneath his axe.  No one would be able to move that without waking him, save if he were dead.

It was inconvenient to find Men practically on the doorstep of such a lode; more than vexing, even though it was no more than a woman and a child, since the woman had the eyes of a hawk and the boy liked to roam.  They should not be here: this had been dwarven land since before the seas drowned Beleriand.  But so it was—despite war and plague, Men multiplied and Dwarves did not.  It was good to have Men nearby, for trade that saved them the trouble of getting their own food, but not too close.

This was too close.  Yet like Saelon's madness in staying here to tend him, how could he candidly complain?  If they had not been so close, he and Thekk and Vestri would be lying on that moor together, the birds picking their bones clean, and these gems would have sunk into the mire and been lost . . . a grief as great as their deaths.

Then there was this other intruder, far more unwelcome.  Whether there was one or many, whether it was beast or fiend, it would have to be hunted down and slain, for security as much as vengeance.  Veylin was caressing his axe helve and weighing the merits of various tactics when he heard the fall of light, running feet and rose on one elbow.

Gaernath came bursting in the doorway, a bundle of reddish feathers dangling from one hand.  "Good even, Master Veylin," he greeted him with a wide grin.  "Do you like roast grouse?"

Taking grouse with the bow required skill and patience; perhaps he should not dismiss Gaernath as a mere child.  "Most certainly."

"Then you may have the plumpest, since I would not have gotten them without the bow you gave me."

Veylin smiled at him; not a child, but still young, with the charming earnestness of youth.  "The bow was given for services already rendered.  You owe me no more for it."

"You will have the plumpest anyway," the boy said, "to help you mend.  My aunt is spreading the last of the washing to dry; I best get these plucked so she can put them to the fire."

And he was gone as swiftly as he came.  Veylin stared after him.  Strange folk: so poor, yet so open-handed; so defenseless, yet so courageous.  Were more Men like this, or were these two odd even to their own kind, like white crows whose flock would drive them away or kill them for their strangeness?

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

Notes

**Moraine** : the [deposit of mixed sediments](http://www.spencegreen.com/pics/posts/terminal_moraine.jpg) marking the edge of a former glacier.

  **Sea-beryl** : an aquamarine (blue-green beryl).

  **Beryl** : the gemstone producing emeralds and aquamarines; there are other colors as well.

**Ogive** : a [pointed arch](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2673/4117626439_e0e25bf16b_z.jpg?zz=1).

**Box bed** : a [bed enclosed with panels](http://www.electricscotland.com/lifestyle/images/farmh15.jpg), i.e., in a box.  These were more common in the Highlands than beds with curtains, since they were better at keeping out drafts.

**Span** : the distance between the end of the thumb and the end of the little finger on a spread hand, about 9 inches.  I have supposed that a dwarven span is not much less than that of Men.

  **Fire opal** : not the more usual rainbow-colored precious opal, but a distinct subtype [orange in color](http://cdn1.iofferphoto.com/img/item/160/782/403/QSxlS6bLOnNZr2W.jpg).  While fire opals often show no play-of-color, I once saw a specimen that had vibrant play-of-color all in oranges and yellows.  Such truly "fiery" opals are the ones Veylin prefers.  Opals are very sensitive stones, and easily damaged by heat and dehydration.

**Dyke** : a [seam of intrusive igneous rock](http://www.iona-bed-breakfast-mull.com/basalt%20dyke%20Carsaig%20to%20Lochbuie%20Trail.JPG), cross-cutting earlier strata along fault lines, often standing above the surface like a low wall.

  **Schist** : a [metamorphic rock](http://gccweb.gccaz.edu/earthsci/imagearchive/DK_MICA_SCHIST_big.jpg) rich in mica, silvery white to grey, with strong contorted foliation.

  **Cinnabar** : the ore of mercury.


	5. Axes Unsheathed

_When I have ceased to break my wings_  
_Against the faultiness of things,_  
_And learn that compromises wait_  
_Behind each hardly opened gate,_  
_When I can look life in the eyes,_  
_Grown calm and very coldly wise,_  
_Life will have given me the Truth.  
_ _And taken in exchange—my youth._

—Sara Teasdale, "Wisdom"

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

"How does it look?" Veylin asked.

Saelon considered the three great weals marring his back and, since the Dwarf could not see her, shook her head in mute wonder.  Less than a week before, she had steeled herself to burn out the filth poisoning his flesh.  Now the wounds were sloughed nearly clean, merely seeping a little.  "How does it feel?" she countered.

"Weak," he grumbled, flexing his arm.  The play of muscles was broken by the furrows, and the tender pink at their edges strained almost to tearing point.  "Stiff."

"Do not force it," she warned sharply.  Her people prided themselves on their stoicism and strength of will, but he surpassed even the set purpose of her grandmother, who had been so merciless to herself those last years.  "Be patient.  You heal faster than anyone I have tended, but you may still try more than your flesh will yet bear."

Veylin snorted.  "I know the strength of my own flesh.  It is the slow reforging of bone that galls me."

To that there was no answer.  As she salved and dressed his shoulder in lightly padded linen, Saelon gave thought to how she might deal with a fretful Dwarf.  Now that his fever had broken, he slept little and chafed in idleness.  Since they had given him the dwarven gear, he had spent part of each day cleaning it, soaking the blood from the leather and buffing the axes until they shone.  Two evenings ago, after watching Gaernath labor over the shafts of new arrows, he had begun showing the lad a few simple tricks of craft.  Once he had oiled his leather and polished it fine, what could he turn his hand to next?  She did not have the tools he might want—he had thanked her for the loan of her small whetstone graciously enough, but she saw the nick still remained on his axe blade.

Would he be offended if she asked him to mill with the quern?  He might start on a crutch, but he would surely finish the work before it was safe for him to get about on it, and how could she take it from him until then?  "I need to go out for some hours to replenish my stock of herbs," she told him.  She had used prodigious quantities of meadowsweet and goldenrod on him, and she was loathe to face winter with little in store.  The flowers were past their prime, but they would still have virtue, though not for much longer.  And being out in the open air might blow the clutter from her mind.  "You will be all right?"

"Of course."  He sounded as if she had insulted him.

There was something else he might do, and maybe it would soothe his mood in other ways as well.  Before tidying up the ends of her housekeeping, she put water to warm on the fire, and when her pack basket stood ready by the doorway, she carried a steaming pail of it to Veylin's bedside.

"What is that for?" he asked, looking up from compounding clear butter and beeswax for the leather.

Saelon laid down bannocks and cheese with one hand, and a clout of flawed linen, soap, and a comb with the other.  "I have cleaned and mended your clothes, and I thought you might like to see to yourself as well as your gear while I am away."  Going over to the chest, she brought him the pile of neatly folded cloth.

His dour face lightened as he took them from her.  "You are kind."  He stroked the good russet wool of his hood and fingered the linen of his shirt: a simple garment, but a pure shade of saffron, with subtle broidery at cuff and neck.  Saelon had felt clumsy as a girl when she patched the rents in the shoulder, knowing her own stitching was strong rather than fine.

"Be careful with that leg," she reminded him sternly, "and keep the wrapping on your shoulder dry."

"I will be mindful of your work," he promised.  "Be wary as you go," he warned her in return.  "I would not be left with Gaernath as nurse."

"A grim fate indeed," she agreed with a quirk of a smile, shouldering the basket and striding out into the sunshine.

It was a beautiful day: the sky was flecked with white clouds; the wind fresh after the closeness of the cave, the worse for being a sickroom.  Saelon breathed deep and savored the rich hues of the land.  Autumn was upon them, and soon the rains would begin to bleed the color from dead and dying leaf.  She could see the flock high up on the shoulder of the northern headland, Gaernath getting the last good grazing from the rocky slopes.

Walking along the cliff shelf, she stopped to check the bere.  The corn was golden, full-ripe yet not quite hard; if it dried, she would not need to parch it, and the weather seemed like to hold for a day or two.  Tomorrow she could harvest or, if the weather remained fair, she might put it off another day, and bring in more of the peats that had been curing through the summer.  Then there were the hazelnuts and sloes . . . .  Such a crowded season; an ill time to lose a week, and to fear lingering outside beyond dusk.

The goldenrod grew best along the dry top of the cliff, where she could look out across the boundless sea, its blue-grey surface wrinkled as freshly washed linen, flecked with white like the canach-tufted bogs.  From the west, they need have no fear.  Yet eastward the folded land hid much and beyond the peaks of the mountains, sea-colored at this distance, pierced the bluer sky like blunted teeth.  North and south she gazed, up and down the coast; but all was peaceful, with naught moving but bird and beast, wind and wave.

Somewhat reassured, Saelon left the heights, traipsing down to the banks of the little river behind the machair.  In the meads along its edges she found the last of the meadowsweet.  Not as much as she wished, of course, but hopefully more than they would need before summer came around again with fresh bloom.  So warm was the air in the sheltered curve where the sun fell full upon the water that she decided she could use a bathe herself, plunging into a pool where the current's chill was tempered and spreading her hair over her shoulders to dry as she gathered the last of the berries and a generous measure of crimson rose hips.

It was such a glorious afternoon, dripping the kindliness of the harvest season like honey from a comb, that she lingered longer than she had planned.  The freedom of solitude; the untroubled flit of the finches and wrens, with a thrush singing atop a tall hazel . . . it was a balm after the worry and vexation of the last week.  She filled her shawl with early hazelnuts as an excuse for delay, but when the sun drew near the top of the ridge, she could tarry no longer.

Crossing the machair, Saelon saw Gaernath bringing the flock down and waved to reassure him all was well.  If she hurried, she could make it to the cave and unload the herbs and fruit before going down to milk the ewes.  Starting up the track, she noticed a raven perched on the point of rock by the burn; a lone raven, at a time when they usually traveled by families.  Like the one on the moor, where they had found Veylin.

"Halt!" commanded a booming voice, and a Dwarf in helm and hauberk stepped around the boulder at the turning, a naked axe in his hand.  Hearing booted footfalls behind her, Saelon turned her head.  There was a second armed Dwarf astride the track, broadhead arrow poised on drawn bow.  "Where," growled the first as she looked back, startled and affronted, "are our kin?"

She gazed on him through narrowed eyes.  Little of his face could be seen behind the guard of his helm, hardly more than the glint of eyes above a beard as fiery as Gaernath's hair.  "Who are you?" she asked with cold dignity, refusing to be daunted.

From his curt tone, he considered her of little consequence, and insolent to boot.  "I am Thyrnir, son of Thekk.  Answer my question, woman!"

"Safer than I found them, Thyrnir, son of Thekk."  She was silent for the moment that took to bite, then added, "Are you daunted by a woman and a boy, that you come in such force to redeem them?"

"Keep a civil tongue," threatened the Dwarf with the bow, "or you may lose the use of it."

They stood poised thus, on the bitter edge of discourtesy and ignorance, when Saelon heard Gaernath's light footfalls coming up the steep side of the slope, his usual shortcut.  She glanced swiftly to where he would appear, to order him to peace until the misunderstanding was exposed, and as he crested the ridge, he stopped stock-still, staring astonished at the scene below him.  Before she could speak, the archer swung his aim—and the lad dropped before the Dwarf could loose.  A confused noise of threshing and scrambling told her he was half-rolling, half-sliding back down the slope through the heather.

The Dwarf leapt up towards the crest of the ridge, bow at the ready.  Did he mean to shoot the lad?  Saelon bounded after him, heedless of Thyrnir and his axe, and the heavy pack on her back.  Yes, the archer paused to sight and reach full draw.  Saelon did not pause, but ran against him, bruising herself on his mailed back.  They both tumbled down the tussocky slope.  A packstrap parted and she lost her load; the Dwarf cursed; two sets of booted feet ran belatedly after her.

When she finally snagged on a young whin, she saw Gaernath running for the grazing garron like a hounded buck.

The archer, who had not slid so far, cast aside his broken bow with an oath, then gave a cry of joy and sprang into a dense clump of heather, coming up with another bow.  The one Veylin had given the lad.  But the archer's triumph turned to cold, silent rage as he stared at it.

A powerful hand knotted itself in her hair, tearing her from the whin and dragging her to her knees.  "Isn't that Vestri's?" rumbled a deeper voice.  This was a heavier Dwarf, his braided beard dark brown.

"Yes."  The archer's voice chilled Saelon's blood.  The bowstring was broken, however.  Gaernath was beyond their reach.

Thyrnir gazed after him.  The lad had caught the dapple and was kicking him into a laborious canter, heading for the break in the cliffs.  "He is a beardless stripling," Thyrnir observed, but the others paid little attention.  "Enough of this," the brown-bearded Dwarf declared and started marching up the slope, his remorseless grip forcing her to stumble after him.  "Let us see what awaits us under this high cliff."

The red-bearded Dwarf went first, peering suspiciously among the rowans and may as if expecting an ambush, but all they found was the geese, yammering and hissing, beating the air with their wide white wings.  As they paused in the dooryard, frowning with puzzled disdain at the heather-thatched wattle walling the cave, there came a deep growl from within; growling and a stumping, dragging noise.  Saelon opened her mouth to protest, but the Dwarf cruelly wrenched her hair, stealing her breath long enough for him to shift his grip and clap his hand over her mouth.  All three hefted their axes—

Thyrnir dropped his as Veylin caught the side of the doorway and raised the axe he had been using as a crutch.  All sound, save the geese, died as the Dwarves stared at each other.  Then, as Veylin faltered, Thyrnir flung himself forward and caught him.  "Thyrnir?" Veylin asked in wonder.

"Yes, uncle."  Thyrnir sank to his knees, easing Veylin down.  "We have come."  The red-bearded Dwarf reached out hesitantly towards the splinted leg, its dressings blotched with fresh blood, then drew his hand back, his voice becoming harsh once more.  "What have they done to you?  Where is my father, and Vestri?"

"He is dead.  They are both dead."  The grief he had not shown before her cracked Veylin's voice, and the Dwarf's grip tightened so that Saelon feared for her jaw.  She dropped to her knees in pain and her own grief: for the needless damage to Veylin's healing leg; for Gaernath, riding into the fiend-haunted night, weaponless; for the senselessness of this moil.

The movement caught Veylin's eye and he turned towards her, staring in disbelief.  "Rekk?  What are you about?"  Veylin's voice slid from relieved surprise to outrage.  "Unhand her!"

Rekk's hold loosened, but he did not let go.  "She attacked Oddi, bare-handed."

Veylin looked around sharply.  "Where is the boy?"

"Fled," Thyrnir answered.

"With night falling?"  Veylin met Saelon's gaze, and she shut her eyes against his distress.  It was vain; the harm was done.  "Let me understand," Veylin rumbled ominously, "you have abused this lady, who saved my life, and driven her kinsman, a child, into the hills where the fell thing that killed Thekk and Vestri roams?"

"He had Vestri's bow," Oddi said, voice like an over-wrung cord.

"I gifted it to him."  The hand fell from her face.  "Saelon," Veylin said, breaking the awful silence that had fallen, "help me to my bed.  I fear I have not been as mindful of your work as I promised."  She rose and went to him, taking him from his nephew's arms without a word.  When she got him inside, she sat him by the hearth, with her kist as a backrest, and began unstrapping his leg.

He touched her cheek with uncertain gentleness, and when he drew his hand back she saw a smear of blood on his fingers.  "Your pardon, lady," he murmured.  "When our hearts are hot, we have little patience.  My kinsmen's wits have been led astray by their grief."

"I hear you," she replied flatly.  "But I, too, have a kinsman astray, and he is alone and unarmed."

Veylin was silent as she checked his leg, though she knew he must be in great pain.  The broken bone had pierced his flesh again; it must be cleaned and reset.  And this time he was not senseless.  When she went out to fetch water, the other Dwarves were gone.  For the moment or for good?  She found she did not care.  Meadowsweet and goldenrod . . . her basket of autumn's bounty, tumbled and lost among the heather.  Where would the lad go?  Would he stay close, foolishly hoping to come to her rescue, of keeping his word to protect her?  Or would he be wise enough—or frightened enough—to run for home?  Which was worse, for him to be near that bloodstained moor, or crossing the mountains where more than one of the _raugs_ might roam?

As she finished laving the reopened wound, there was a hesitant knock on the doorpost.  When she did not turn, Veylin touched her shoulder and nodded towards the door.

The three had returned, without helms and mail, their hoods in their hands.  Saelon glanced at Veylin's face: it was stern with disapproval, but he longed to be with them, his own folk, for comfort and to share their grief.  He was not looking at her, or thinking of his leg.

Without warning, she heaved on his ankle, so the bone fell back into place.

Veylin's howl rang from the cave's roof.  She began salving the wound, ignoring his gasps and the shaky hand he held up, with a forbidding glare directed over her shoulder.  It did not take her long to wrap it with moss and linen, and restrap the splint.  "There," she said coolly.  "It might still knit, if you stay off it."  Rising, she collected her pail and looked from Veylin to the three Dwarves standing in a tight knot just inside the doorway.  "Now, I must milk my sheep before dark, and I expect you have much to say to each other."  Then she strode past them, out into the dusk.

Later she could not remember going down the track or milking the ewes, but when she finished it came to her that she had not been down to the shore since before Veylin came to them.  Although the western sky was fading to purple, she climbed the dunes.  The wind was picking up, and short, choppy waves were breaking high on the foreshore.  Releasing her disheveled hair, she let the wind flow through it, as the river had earlier, and watched the day darken to black.

She should go back to the cave.

Why?  Was it safer there?  To tend Veylin, when that kindness had brought her so much trouble?  To see to the comfort of the most unwelcome guests she had ever had?

Unwelcome they were, but they were guests and the discourtesy had not all been on one side.  The sooner that leg knitted, the sooner they would be gone, and she would have her peace again.

Only when they fell did she realize tears were streaming down her face.

She would not have her peace again.  All the nights she had sat out beneath the wheeling stars, drinking in the crystal clarity of the wind, alone and free . . . .  Now there was evil in the darkness.  How had she acquired so many ties, so many duties?

The collie needed his supper.

Saelon walked down onto the strand, out onto one of the dark rocks, and knelt.  Cupping her hands, she washed the tears from her face with salt water.  It stung where the whin had scratched her, but it was a cleansing bite, and its chill was welcome on her bruised mouth.

Something moved among the dunes.

She stayed still, but her heart lurched and pounded.  Foolish, to stay here so long!  Yet the slap and hiss of the waves had spoken to her anger, drawing it out.  "Who is it?" she challenged.  If it was the _raug_ , she could always throw herself into the sea . . . .

The dark shape came a little further down the strand.  Drawing off a helm, it bowed low.  "Rekk, son of Ekki, lady.  At your service."

Saelon fingered her aching jaw, remembering his clutch.  "What brings you here, Rekk?"

He straightened and resettled his helm on his head.  "We feared you might have come to harm, lady, being gone so long."

"I have been cooling my heart."

The Dwarf did not reply for some time; he might have been one of the worn stones on the shore.  "That would take time," he eventually agreed.  "Should I leave you?"

Saelon gazed out over the dark sea.  "No," she said and sighed.  "I will come."  Picking up the milk pail, she crossed onto the sand and headed for the dunes.

Rekk fell in beside her, respecting her silence, watching the darkness around them, so she let her mind turn to what needed doing.  Feed the collie and feed her guests.  There was the remaining mutton ham, and dried fish aplenty, but little corn and that unground.  Butter and honey needed bread.  If the nuts hadn't been lost, she might have eked the bere out with them, if there had been time to roast them—

The geese hissed as they came into the dooryard, still unsettled at the presence of strangers.  A goose?  If they stayed more than a day, she might stew the old gander; he would be too tough to roast.

They had let the leather curtain down across the door.  Rekk stepped ahead to hold it aside, and bowed her through.

Three bearded faces turned towards her, expectant yet uneasy as the geese.  Even Veylin, though his tone was hearty.  "Ah, good.  We were beginning to fear something had happened to you."  As Rekk set his helm and axe against the far wall, Veylin said, "Oddi, some mead for Saelon."

The cave was well-lit, with several more—and better—lamps than she remembered possessing.  Her basket leaned against one wall, her shawl still bound across the top.  The board had been set up to one side and was laid for dinner.  There was a pile of bannocks in the middle, flanked by honey and butter and cheese, and at the hearth, Thyrnir was cooking onions and mutton on the griddle.

Oddi bowed and offered her a small silver cup brimming with mead.  "Drink, lady, and keep the cup in token of my regret for putting your kinsman to flight.  May he come safely home again, so I can thank him for his care of my son."

Saelon gazed into the Dwarf's dark eyes.  Grasping, they were called, and proud; quick to take offense and unforgiving.  He had not asked for forgiveness; yet this was open-handed, in honor and in wealth.  The cup was a beautiful thing, as fine as the one her brother used on high days though not so ornate . . . but it did not touch her heart.  She would accept no wergild for Gaernath, were he living or were he dead.

But he had not asked her to take it for Gaernath, only for his regret.  A guilt-payment, not a blood-price, where what mattered was that he valued what he surrendered.  To refuse would be a declaration of implacable enmity.  Bitter though she was, she did not hate them.  "Thank you for your good word on him," she replied, choosing her words with care as she accepted the cup from his still-waiting hands.  "I am sorry for your loss."

Oddi bowed so low his black beard brushed the floor, murmuring something she couldn't understand.

When she drank, there was a kind of sigh, as if the Dwarves had been holding their breath.  The mead was sweet and smooth, but almost as warming was the thought that they had not taken her good grace for granted.

Now Rekk came forward, drawing something from his neck.  "Accept this," he asked.

A chain of gold gleamed on his horny palm.  "In return for what?"

He was blunter of speech.  "I should not have handled you as an enemy."

She lifted it from the hand that had torn her hair and crushed her mouth.  A fair thing, sun-bright, warm from his heat.  "Why did you treat us so?"

Rekk gave a low whistle, and dark wings threshed the air.  A raven—the same lone raven she had seen twice before—flew down from the top of the wattle wall to settle on Rekk's outstretched arm.  Cocking its head to fix her with a shining eye, it shuffled nervously, almost guiltily.  "Where is Thekk, Craec?" Rekk asked.

"North," the bird said mournfully in an eerie, almost human voice.  "Dead.  Dead," it repeated.

"Who has done this?"

Craec ruffled up his black feathers and drew his head down, but his only response was a harsh croak.

"Who?" Rekk demanded.  "Who has them?"

"Men."

The Dwarf threw his arm sharply upwards, and the raven caught the air awkwardly, beating back to its perch on the wall.  "Craec is a young and unpromising bird," Rekk said harshly, "but my brother had a fondness for him, and when the bird returned alone, so I questioned him.  With what ill result you know."

"I saw Craec where they fell," Saelon told him.  "He guarded their bodies from the corbies."

Rekk grunted.  "Will you take my ransom, lady?"

A less generous heart, though perhaps it was unfair to judge when the need for vengeance lay so heavily on him.  Many a man had been bent under that burden.  "I will."  Setting the cup on the board, she drew back her wild hair, twining the gold into her dark tresses.  Let him see it there and be reminded of the ill his impatience had wrought.

It was a strained, awkward meal, though the food was good.  The bannocks had not taken the last of her bere, as she had feared, but were made from some lighter, sweeter grain.  She had little appetite, but ate dutifully: she would need her strength, and elsewise the mead would go to her head.  Even so, she could feel it when she rose from the board.  "I must leave you for a time, masters, and go down to the machair to feed the dog that keeps my sheep."

"Cannot you wait until morning?" Veylin urged.

"No."

"It is unsafe," Rekk declared.

"Of course.  Nevertheless, since my kinsman is not here to see to it, the dog needs feeding."

Rekk scowled, but before he could say more, Veylin cut in with brusque haste, "As you will, lady."

Thyrnir rose from the bench.  "May I guard you as you go?"

Saelon considered him.  He had said little but listened much, and she had the impression that he was younger than the others, though there was not much difference to the eye.  "If you wish."  She did not say that whatever had wreaked the carnage on the moor would not be stayed by a single axe.

It was blacker outside for the light within, and as Saelon paused to regain some night sight, the red-bearded Dwarf hurried after her, helm still in hand.  "You need no light, lady?" he asked.

"No.  My feet know their way well enough.  Do you?"

Was that a smile in his voice?  "Do not let it be said that a Dwarf called for light where a Man needed none.  Lead on!"

After collecting several of last winter's sgadan from the byre-cave, she led the way down to the machair.  High, scudding clouds dimmed the starlight.  A whistle brought the collie running, though he halted with a growl when he saw the strange figure near her.  "Come!" she ordered shortly, and to the Dwarf, "Here, give him this.  He will not bite," she assured Thyrnir when he held back.  "It is the only way to have peace between you."

It was hard to tell who was more reluctant: the Dwarf, who held the oily fish at his fingers' ends, or the collie, who took the morsel with his front teeth before backing away.  At least now there was one Dwarf whom the collie would not bite except under dire provocation.  Saelon laid the rest of the fish on the turf as Thyrnir scrubbed his fingers against the grass to clean them.  "Why do you not bring the sheep up to that other cave?"

"If a hungry fiend roams at night, I would rather it feast down here than seek meat by my door."

Thyrnir made a short sound of approbation.  "Are you not afraid, lady?"

"Of what?  A murderous _raug_ , or short-tempered Dwarves?"  She regretted it as soon as it was out; that was the mead speaking.

"You do not find the Dwarves biddable?"  His tone cooled suddenly.

"Dwarves are not known for their complaisance," she observed.  "But—" she added, feeling him bristle at her side on the narrow track "—you have made such amends as you could.  That has taken the edge from my anger; do not think it has blunted it entirely."  He made a short bow and was silent.  A few paces further on, Saelon asked, "You called Veylin uncle.  Are he and Rekk brothers?"

"Veylin is my mother's brother," Thyrnir corrected.

"How does Oddi come into this?"

"His son, Vestri, was prenticed to Veylin."

These three had lost blood kin . . . .  She had seen how Veylin ached to avenge their deaths, yet his ties were not so close, by marriage and duty, or friendship.  "Your grief must be great."

"Yes, it is.  Yet," he continued, "it would be greater but for your care of Veylin.  He is very dear to me."  After a pause, he asked, "Will he walk again?"

Saelon sighed.  "If he were a Man, I would say no.  Still, if he were a Man, he would have died before we found him; or during the journey from moor; or the fever would have taken him.  I do not know Dwarves.  I cannot judge."

Thyrnir's hand touched her arm, staying her at the edge of the dooryard.  "You have judged well so far," he told her.

And that was a gift of greater value than silver or gold.

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Notes

**Clout** : Scots, piece of cloth.

**Sgadan** : Scots Gaelic, "herring" ( _Clupea harengus_ ).


	6. Earth and Water

_Nothing under heaven is softer or weaker than water,_  
_and yet nothing is better_  
_for attacking what is hard and strong,  
_ _because of its immutability._

\-- _Tao Te Ching_ , chapter 43

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * 

"Is she sane," Thyrnir asked in low-voiced Khuzdul, "living here alone, so near the sea?"

The two of them were sitting on a rock slab near the edge of the long-stranded beach terrace, looking out over the plain.  Veylin puffed on the youngster's pipe.  It was good to be out of that den and see the lie of the land at last.  Rekk and Oddi had helped carry him here before setting off for the moor; they were crossing the plain now, following the leisurely wingbeats of Craec.  The day was dawning fair, and his heart was lighter for the company of his nephew and the knowledge that the hunt was afoot, even if he was not.

"Men are strange," he replied in the same tongue.  Saelon had not yet risen, which was unusual, but the mead had been strong.  It would not gentle her mood if she slipped out in her soft-footed way and heard such blunt talk.  "It is hard to be sure.  As for the sea—"  Its restless crawl and ceaseless muttering against the steadfast rim of the earth was not pleasant, and he knew it disturbed him less than the others.  "—she is Dúnedain, and it calls to the alloy of Elf in her blood, I think."

"I had forgotten that."  Thyrnir reached out and Veylin passed the pipe back.  "But still—a woman alone?  Unprotected?  From what you say, the boy was no guardian, but a fosterling.  Certainly she defended him, not the other way around."

Veylin considered the tidy dooryard, with its fenced garden, skeps of bees, and the stand of ripe corn further along the terrace.  "She seems to have fared well 'til now.  This is not the work of a single year, or even a few, though she will not say how long she has dwelt here."

"I grant that she is able, even masterful, but why would she live so far from her kin?"

That was the question.  In this troubled world, solitude was a poor defense.  She was fortunate that they were folk of honor, and not outlaws or enemies.  "I wonder myself.  Skilled and generous as she is, they must be fools not to keep her close.  Unless," he reflected, "they consider her over-masterful.  You have seen how Men treat their women."

Thyrnir snorted.  "With such meek dams, how can they be other than weak?"

"This one," Veylin warned, "has marrow in her bones."

"Of that there is no doubt.  But it's of little matter.  As soon as we have seen to father and Vestri, we will carry you home.  I wonder where the nearest timber is."  Thyrnir looked over the treeless slopes with a frown.  "A litter will take something larger than these small trees can supply."

"Ask before you set your axe to any," Veylin counseled, "and pass the pipe again.  Saelon believes the fiends shun rowans."

Thyrnir smiled dismissively.  "A little tree, good only for small things.  The berries are of more value than the wood.  She may keep such a pale—we won't get you home on rowan."

Veylin gazed into the bowl of the pipe, then drew on it thoughtfully.  "I am not sure I want to be carried home."

Thyrnir raised his fiery brows.  "Are you so taken with this reckless madwoman?"

Too far away for a good cuff, Veylin snatched up a pebble and flicked it at him.  "Impudent beardling," he growled.  "You know where my heart is given."

"You found—?" Thyrnir began, then turned his head at the scrape of foot on stone, leather being drawn back from the doorway.  "Good morning, lady," he greeted Saelon in the Common Speech.

Her look of perplexity and concern passed when her gaze fell on him, and Veylin smiled around the pipestem.  Let her learn not to be so sure of him.  "Ah," she breathed, eyes narrowed, as if contemplating a rebuke.  If so, she kept it behind her teeth.  "Good morning, masters.  Where are your companions?"

"They have gone to the moor," Thyrnir told her, "to seek what slew our kin."

"With what guide?" she asked, with a puzzled frown.

"Craec knows the place."

"Of course; I had forgotten.  Have you broken your fast?"

"Yes."

For a moment she seemed at a loss, with naught to do for them, then said, "Good," in a brisk voice, and turned back into the cave.

Thyrnir glanced at him, brows lifted in curiosity and amusement.  _She has tended me constantly these days_ , Veylin shaped in _iglishmêk_.  _Look kindly on her_.

_I do.  Oddi may have been over-generous with the mead, however._

If she was the worse for drink, she hid it well.  She reappeared shortly with a bundle of cloth in one hand and made for the burn; when she returned, her hair was neatly dressed and she wore a finer shawl.  Yet neither that nor the gold woven among her dark tresses hid the mark of Rekk's hand on her naked face.  "Would you like me to tend your leg?" she asked.  "If your nephew has not treated such a wound before, I can show him how."

"If you would."  Veylin matched her formality, welcoming the loss of forced intimacy.  _She would not have another workman spoil her efforts_.  "I have been a burden on you too long."

_We may have spoilt them already_ , Thyrnir signed.  _Twice mended is seldom straight._

Saelon did not contradict him, but knelt to unwrap his leg.  Against the dun mottling of fading bruises, the reopened wound on his shin was livid in the clear light of day.  Plainly and without pity she described the nature of the damage to Thyrnir—the torn sinew at the knee, the gravity of the broken bone having been exposed so long—then took him into the cave to show him such herb-lore as she considered necessary.

Left alone, Veylin turned his attention to the landscape, admiring the great boss of darkened schist that anchored the bay to the south, the lower headland on the north clawed with dykes, and the fair cliffs between them.  This was a wide bay for this part of the coast, its plain perhaps seven hundred paces across and half as deep, the rich green turf showing that blown sand had buried the floor deep.  Dunes marched, a shifting, untrustworthy wall, between it and the hammer of the waves—the Lord of Waters beating ceaselessly on Mahal's anvil, grinding good rock to dust.

The power of water to cut and shape stone was often a wonder and delight, but here it was starkly overwhelming.  Sitting nearly sixty paces above it gave little comfort when the cliff behind bore all the marks of the sea's working.  Perhaps there was something in Saelon's belief that evil would avoid the shore: Mahal and the Lord of Waters were friends, yet only the desire to rescue gems from the wreck gave him the will to suffer the quiescent menace.  How could she be other than stout-hearted, staring that in the face every day?

Saelon and Thyrnir came out again; she carried her laden packbasket to a larger cave a little ways north of hers, while his nephew joined him, hands full of linen and moss and salve.  "She makes it seem a child's task," Thyrnir said, setting them down on the slab, "but it's the simplicity of polished craft.  You fell into good hands."

"You did not trust my judgment on that?"

"I am happier to have judged for myself," the youngster met him halfway.  "We can make better work of this brace, though."

"Before you find more opportunities for carpentry," Veylin suggested, "you might see if there is another place we could house.  I have been too much underfoot, and it is not right that we should be always in her face."  He looked towards the larger cave.  "What is that like?"

"A sound little cavern," Thyrnir allowed, most of his attention on Veylin's shin, fingers delicately probing the damage, bringing it a fraction straighter.  "Unfortunately, she has long used it to stable her beasts."

Veylin grunted as bone met bone, turning away to consider the rest of the cliff.  "There must be others.  Something smaller will do, for a few days."

"As soon as I have given these splints some shape, I will see what I can find."

Once leg and shoulder had been tended, the two of them sat companionably in the sun, Thyrnir shaving the wood smooth and fitting it to his leg, Veylin patiently grinding the nick out of his axe blade with his nephew's whetstone.  It was not the mar falling against a stone would leave, and given Saelon's tale of a severed hand, he salved his impotent frustration with the thought that he had given the creature that wound.  A hand was a sorer loss than a leg.

Though the bone that would chip this steel must rival a troll's.  His thoughts turned to Rekk and Oddi, and he hoped Saelon's guess that the thing was a night-stalker was good.  Might this be some new breed of troll, loosed by the Enemy to further devil the West, crossed with some beast so rank it overwhelmed the stone-tang of troll-blood?

When they had slain it, they might get answers.

Saelon went about her work as if they were not there: milking her ewes; hauling the heather of his sickbed out of her cave and sweeping the flags vigorously clean.  The peat-ash she spread on her garden, pausing to pluck some weeds from among the young kail plants.  Thyrnir, having fitted the reworked brace onto Veylin's leg with leather straps for greater security, wandered down along the southern end of the cliff, studying the face and the tumble at its foot.  Now, as the woman finished spreading her blankets over the whitethorns to air, he approached her.  "Lady, is there a spade I might borrow?"

"Certainly," she replied, although she looked puzzled.  "For what?"

"There is another cave a bit further along the cliff, though the mouth is mostly buried.  I would clear it, so we might be a little further off and less trouble."

She considered this.  "How long might you stay?"

"A few more days, no more," he assured her.

Saelon favored him with her half-smile.  "I think I can bear with you for a few more days.  There is no need to put yourself to the trouble."

"You are kind," Thyrnir told her with a short bow.  "But we would prefer it."

Her look turned cool.  "As you will.  You will find the spade, and such other tools as I have, in the larger cave, on the right hand.  Use what you need.  All I ask is that you leave them as you found them."

"Of course."

Leaving with her packbasket soon after on some errand, Saelon was spared his nephew's opinion of her meager store of tools, and the spade in particular.  It served, however, and by the time she returned, bent under a load of peats, Thyrnir had broke through into the void behind.

Veylin raised a hand in welcome as she looked around her deserted dooryard, then shouted towards the dark hole at the top of the steeply sloping spoil, "Is it good?"

The youngster crawled back out, shaking the chalky dust from his hood.  "Passable.  Bigger than I suspected, and the roof is solid.  There is more to clear than I thought, though."

"An undignified scramble," Veylin judged, eyeing the opening, "but it might be safer so.  I would be glad of more than a few sticks between us and what may walk in the night."

"We can scramble, but what of you?  Ah, thank you, lady," Thyrnir said, as Saelon came over with a stoup and offered him a cup of water.  He looked at the blade of her spade before setting it aside.  "I will have to carve you a new spade before we leave, unless you have a bit of spare iron I could shoe this one with."

She considered as he drank.  "The only metal I have to spare is a knife whose temper I spoilt, but if you are willing to do a bit of smithing, I would rather have it rehardened than turned into a spade shoe.  I only have the two knives."

"I cannot help you there," Thyrnir replied.  "A hammer and a flat stone will make a spade shoe, but peat will not give enough heat to quench and temper a blade; nor even wood, without good bellows.  No matter.  Once this is done, I will be making a litter so we can carry Veylin home.  If you tell me where I can find suitable timber, I will replace your spade as well."

"There is always good wood down on the shore," Saelon replied.  "How large a piece of timber?"

"The shore?" Thyrnir echoed, with obvious distaste.  "Where is the next nearest?"

Saelon's expression turned dubious.  "You would want what?  Oak?"

"Or ash."

"There is no ash hereabouts.  The nearest oakwood is not quite a league to the southeast, in the shelter of the hills.  A long way to carry timber, especially since Gaernath took the garron."

"The oakwood will better suit my purposes," he declared.

She was unconvinced, eyes hooded like a hackled hawk.  "Do you mislike the sea?"

"All Dwarves mislike the sea," Thyrnir answered shortly.

"I thought only evil things shunned the sea."

"Is that why you feel secure," Thyrnir scoffed, "behind your flimsy wattle wall?"

"Saelon," Veylin exclaimed, alarmed to see them suddenly turn flint and steel, "few Men can long bear a mountain's weight over their head, but is such unease a mark of malice?"  He gestured towards the ocean, more oppressive by far.  "Do none of your own folk fear it?  For I hear you are Dúnedain, and Númenor was drowned deep."

From her stillness, he knew he had hit some mark.  "Your pardon, masters," she asked after a moment, meeting Thyrnir's sullen gaze.  "I told you," she reminded him, "that I do not know Dwarves."

"And that your anger was only blunted," he added.  Handing back the cup, he picked up the spade and went back to digging.

"Leave him," Veylin advised, as she hesitated, as if contemplating a reply.

Saelon came over and sat beside him, offering the cup and stoup.  "Truly," she asked, after he had drunk, "you are troubled by the sea?"

"Truly.  Do you not find it . . . disquieting?"

She gazed out at the boundless expanse of heaving water.  "It is the only place I am not disquieted."

The serenity that came over her scratched and bruised face could not be gainsaid.  "Is that why you are so far from your kin?"

"One reason."  Rising, she went back along the foot of the cliff to her own tasks.

Veylin watched her go and shook his head.  A strange woman, almost as close as a Dwarf.  There was a puzzle here, but a darker riddle demanded his attention now.  As Thyrnir had said, she was of little matter beside their duty to the dead and the ache for vengeance.  When he had returned home, he would give thought to the best way to repay her for her care of him.  In the meantime, keeping her and the others from bitter misunderstanding would be no trifle.

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

The setting sun cast a golden glow on the cliffs as Rekk and Oddi returned, toiling up the track more heavily burdened than they had left.  Thyrnir left the burnside, where he had been washing up, and joined them, taking a pair of packs from Rekk.  Even from where he sat, on a rough stone seat outside the new delf, Veylin recognized them—his pack and Thekk's, left under the rock ledge where they had camped.  Craec soared up ahead of them, rising all the way to the top of the cliff before perching.

That did not bode well for their mood.

"What did you find, aside from the packs?" Veylin asked flatly when they joined him.  Although he had had Gaernath's tale, enough to fire any heart, he wished to hear it confirmed and get some hope of vengeance.

"The cairn," Oddi answered, shrugging off his double burden, his own pack and Vestri's.  "It was as the boy told you.  He built it high, capped with white quartz.  No one could miss it."

"What is this?"  Rekk stared at the passage Thyrnir had finally shoveled down to rock not long before.

"Veylin thought we should trespass on Saelon's hospitality less," Thyrnir explained.  "There is a decent cave behind the spoil.  I've laid heather for beds, and a fire to drive out the damp."

"It will be good not to have her always about," Rekk approved.  Oddi had already stepped into the cave for a look.

"Was there any trail to follow?" Veylin demanded.

"Too much time has passed."  Rekk's anger had settled, like a bonfire falling into a bed of red-hot embers.  "Scraps of cloth are all that remain.  The rains washed away whatever spoor was left.  If there was a hand or paw, birds and beasts have devoured it."

"A rough job," Oddi commented, coming back out.

"All I had was an unshod spade," Thyrnir told him.

"Is it to hand?  I don't like the slope on the inner face."

"Your son's slayer walks the world," Rekk pointed out, irritated by their lack of attention, "and you would putter with a spade?"

Oddi slowly turned his head, more than matching Rekk's glare.  "My axe is sharp, but there is no trail.  Tomorrow I will find a fit place to lay my son.  I do not want to start that day by digging myself out of an ill-cut scrape."

Thyrnir folded his arms and jerked his beard along the cliff-face.  "The spade was borrowed from Saelon.  You can ask for the loan of it."

"Never mind," Oddi said dismissively, walking over to his pack for the mattock.  "You may be happier with wood than with iron—"

"You two had taken all the digging tools."

"How were we to know you would want them?  You were to nurse Veylin, while we saw to the dead."

"He needs little care.  My father has been slain, and I am left with a beardling's tasks—"

" _I_ didn't ask you to dig this hole.  You could have left Veylin in that woman's care if your heart burnt so hot."

"Leave my uncle in the care of a stranger, not even a Dwarf?"  Thyrnir was outraged.

"Are you saying he does not grieve for his father?" Rekk growled, jealous of his brother's honor.

Forget Saelon; there were quarrels enough among themselves.  "Will you all stop bickering over trifles . . . and me?" Veylin began.  "Let—"

"Easy for you to say," Oddi cut him short.  "The dead were no kin of yours.  Your heart does not burn as ours do."

"My heart does not burn?!" Veylin exploded, slapping his braced leg.  "This creature has crippled me, so I must be a burden on my kin all my days.  You think I want Thyrnir to have to choose between honoring his father and caring for me?"

"You are the one who brought them to this forsaken place."

"Are you saying I led them to their deaths?"

In the perilous pause that hung between them, Saelon's voice rang.  "Masters!  I am sure you are weary and vexed after your laborious day.  Here is ale to slake your thirst and tempers."  She set a pail and two cups down where she stood, still some paces off.  "If you would sup, the board will be laid by the time you have drunk."

They all stared after her as she walked off, it being easier than looking at each other.

"You should have dug further off," Oddi told Thyrnir.

"You may dig where you like," Thyrnir replied.

Rekk walked over and collected the pail, bringing it back to Oddi's side and filling a cup.  "Drink," he told him, holding out the cup.  "Do not argue with the youngster because you can no longer argue with your son.  You know his heart was set on this journey of Veylin's.  He was following his craft, as do we all.  Take it and drink!" he urged, when Oddi remained louring and still.  "You have seen how monstrous this thing is.  We must be patient, and take counsel with each other."

For several long breaths more, Oddi remained unmoved; then he bent enough to take the cup and drink, though he did not speak.

Rekk took the cup to Thyrnir next.  "Drink," he said, and his eyes were bleak.  "When you have seen your father, you will understand why he is so angry."

After his nephew, Rekk brought the ale to Veylin.  "My brother was dear to you," Rekk acknowledged.  "Help me avenge him."

"As if he had been my own brother," Veylin assured him, and took the cup.  The ale was light, hardly bitter at all; unsatisfying for such a pledge, but soothing to a tight throat.

Rekk drained the dregs, then handed cups and pail to Oddi.  "Come, Thyrnir; let's get Veylin to table.  We may be more like civilized folk and less like wargs once we've had our meat."

The board had been set up at their end of the dooryard; far enough back, Veylin noticed, to give no sight of the sea.  It was laid for four, and though a pot of steaming stew sat at one end of the table and a rack of alder-grilled trout—still piping hot—at the other, Saelon was nowhere to be seen.  He was glad for it.  They were all raw enough, without further exposing their flayed feelings to a stranger.

They ate without unnecessary talk, making short work of the fish before settling down to the rich stewed goose.  Simply as it was served, it was a dish good enough for a lord's feast: the strong flavor of the goose artfully complemented by tart berries and mild new hazelnuts.  One would have to have the heart and maw of a dragon not to be mollified by such a meal.

Pushing away his bowl, Rekk drew out his pipe and began filling it.  "For someone so poor, she keeps a good table.  No wonder you look on her so kindly," he commented to Veylin.

"I wish she had been feeding me this well," Veylin grumbled mildly.  "What have you lot done to deserve such fare?"

"Yes, what?" Thyrnir wanted to know, frowning.  "We have injured her, and yet she is generous.  Is she trying to burden us with obligation?"

"I have been open-handed already.  She will get no more from me," Oddi said, pouring himself more ale.

"Or me."  Rekk rose and went to the cave, coming back with his pipe lit and a lamp against the darkening sky.

"I think you do her an injustice," Veylin told them, after turning it over in his mind.  "She is poor, but proud, and would rather give than receive, I guess.  She was not eager to accept your gold and silver last night."

Rekk grunted in a reflective way.  "Very proud," he agreed, and pointed his pipestem at Thyrnir.  "You spoke slightingly to her when we met, and she was curt in return, though she can be courteous when she chooses."

"She is a woman of few words, and those to the point," Veylin said.  "Not unlike yourself."

He blew a disdainful stream of smoke.  "I have been noisy tonight, but someone had to talk sense to you all.  If you like," he turned to Thyrnir, "I will stay with Veylin tomorrow.  You are Thekk's son.  You and Oddi should decide where they will lie."

Thyrnir sat for a long time, turning his cup in his hands.  "Thank you," he finally replied, "but I will remain here.  I am the best carpenter, and without a litter, Veylin cannot be there when we lay them down for their long sleep.  And," he huffed in irritation, "I must go nearly a league for the timber.  That will take most of the morning.  There is no stock of nails, and I do not have the tools I need for proper joinery."

"Why must you go so far for timber?" Oddi asked.

"That is the nearest oak."

"Does Saelon know it?"

"We came near to quarrelling about it."

Oddi nodded towards the track.  "What is this, then?"

Thyrnir turned to look; Veylin twisted as far as he dared and craned his neck.  Saelon was plodding doggedly up the narrow path, dragging a leg-thick log.  When Veylin glanced back, his nephew's expression was set, brows low.  Across from him, Oddi raised his brows and gave a minute shake of his head, then left the table, heading back for the newly opened cave.  So there were only the three of them when she reached the dooryard, blowing like an old pony, and dropped her burden.

"What is this?" Thyrnir asked her.

She tucked a stray wisp of hair back behind her ear.  "Seasoned oak."

"I had said that the oakwood would be better for my purposes."

"If so, I have uses of my own for this."  She pushed the log a little further out of the way with a foot.  "But if it will serve, you are welcome to it.  It is foolish to travel needlessly, especially now."

"You pile favors on me that I am unwilling to repay," Thyrnir told her, his tone surly.

Saelon straightened, folding her arms across her breast and looking down on him from her greater height.  "Let us understand one another," she said, equally blunt.  "The only thing I want that is in your power to give is the death of this _raug_.  You will pursue that for your own satisfaction, but as you have seen—" she turned a grim face on Rekk "—it will not be easy to accomplish.  Therefore I will aid you as I can."

"Even if we have driven your kinsman to his death?" Thyrnir persisted.

Her mouth set to a hard line.  "If such evil befalls, we will see.  Driving is not slaying, however, and Master Oddi has paid his guilt-price."

"In a few days we will be gone, without killing this thing.  Of what use will your aid to us be?"

"Who can tell?  If you would reap, you must sow."

Thyrnir's expression was dissatisfied, but apparently he could think of no apt reply.  "Rekk, will you help me carry Veylin to the cave?  I must see to his leg."

"Leave me for a while," Veylin countered, as they rose.  Rekk cocked an eyebrow, but moved off as if unconcerned at the flick of a finger.  Thyrnir hung by his seat a moment longer, until Veylin met his eyes.  "Bring my pack," he added, brusque.  When they were well away, he turned to regard the woman, still standing like a spear.  "I think," he said, "you may be nearly as stiff-necked as a Dwarf."

Her eyes narrowed.  "Is that meant to be a compliment?"

"Perhaps not," he admitted.  "But I respect you for it.  You said that there is a knife you would have mended.  May I see it?"

Bowing her head, she turned and went into her cave.  With admirable timing, his nephew returned with his pack and set it beside him.  _Thank you_ , Veylin signed.  _Leave her to me._   He was gone again by the time Saelon came back through the doorway.

She paused as she approached, then sat down on the seat across the board before passing him the knife.  He drew it from its sheath and turned it over in his hands in the light of the lamp.  A simple thing, such as a village smith might make for daily need at chore and board.  The iron was poor, the ore probably from a bog and smelted in a small clamp; its temper could never have been good.  He tried it on the edge of the board and shook his head at the result.  "You are not careless," he said.  "How did you come to spoil it?"

Saelon reached for the cup and drank before answering.  "Burning the _raug_ -filth from your shoulder."

His hand went to the wound below his collarbone, rubbing its deep ache.  She continued to stare into the ale, somber and elsewhere in thought, so he looked down on the blade again, noting how much of the bone handle had been calcined by heat.  Grim work; he reproached himself for thinking her hopes of saving his leg came from mere squeamishness.  "And yesterday," he asked.  "The wrench to my leg.  Was that also a cruel kindness?"

The face she raised from the cup was bleak and resigned, deeply sad.  "Cruel.  I feared you would take it so.  You think I would revenge myself so.  On you, who was also injured by their heedlessness."  Wearily, she laid her hands on the board, pushing herself to her feet.

Veylin lunged across the board, catching one slim wrist as she turned to leave.  "Stay," he urged.

"To what end?"

"We are talking at cross-purposes.  I would not have you leave me in this bitter mood."

She took her seat again, but in duty rather than hope.  "What would you say?"

Releasing her, he refilled the cup and offered it to her.  "Kindness, I said as well.  Do not think I misprize it, even if it is alloyed with something baser.  I do not say yours is," he added quickly, "although I do not understand how it could not be, under the circumstances.  The thought of that flame-headed child astray is as sore as my shoulder."

Saelon accepted the cup, but did not drink.  "You were not to blame."

"You are just," Veylin commended, bowing.  "We are not used to finding such discrimination in others."

"There is too little justice in the world," she agreed, so gravely that he guessed she spoke from other experience.

"Too true.  That is why my nephew mistrusts yours."

She shook her head regretfully.  "He bears little blame, but I have spoken harshly to him."

That was an ill they would have to settle between them.  "With all that has passed, it would be surprising if you did not feel the need to bite.  But I am glad to hear you may require some pardon," he said, reaching out to take the ale she had not drunk.  "I was beginning to fear your nobility would run my debt so high it could never be paid."

Anger sparked in her eyes, and for a moment, he thought he had dared too much; then one corner of her mouth curved into that wry half-smile, though her gaze remained piercing.  "Alas, that I cannot refound the fortunes of my house through my courtesy.  Mother said as much."  It was the first glimmer of humor he had seen from her since the others arrived.

Veylin snorted, and set the cup between them.  "Do not expect too much," he warned.  "I am no dwarven king, and even they are not so rich as they once were."  He thought of Durin's Heir, laboring over iron at his forge down south.  "This, though," he picked up the ruined knife and slid it into the shadows at the far end of the board.  "I can better that."  Turning to his pack, he opened it and took out what lay on top—cloak, blanket, traveling rations, clean shirt and trews—until he reached his spare knife.  "It is a trifle, in the balance with my life," he confessed, handing it over, "but take it as surety of more to come."

She drew it from its sheath, handling it with a respect that Veylin found reassuring.  It would have been difficult to injure yourself seriously with the other; with this one, you might take a finger and feel it too late.  "I have rarely seen a better," she told him, after testing its edge by shaving a few hairs from her arm.

"Take the whetstone as well," he judged, bending back to his pack.  "Yours will have little bite on the steel."

"Thank you," she said, as he passed her the bar of good grit.

He bowed.  "I am glad I have something you value.  You may have to wait long for the death we both desire."

She raised the cup in both hands.  "May it come soon," she prayed, and drank deep.

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

Notes

**_Tao Te Ching_** : this is from a translation of the Ma-wang-tui manuscripts (Mair 1990), which are some five centuries older than the previous standard text.  The chapter numbering differs from the standard text as well; in previous texts, this was chapter 78.

**Khuzdul** : the secret language of the Dwarves.

**Skep** : a [bee-hive made of coiled straw](http://harvest.canadaeast.com/image.php?id=468427&size=265x0).

**Pale** : [fence of upright posts](http://niahd.wm.edu/attachments/36938.jpg), palisade; as in "beyond the pale."

**_Iglishmêk_** : dwarven gesture-language.  See HoME XI: _War of the Jewels_ , p. 395:

They possessed in fact a secondary _tengwesta_ of gestures, concurrent with their spoken language, which they began to learn almost as soon as they began learning to speak.  . . .  Not for communication at a distance, for the Dwarves were short-sighted, but for secrecy and for exclusion of strangers.

The component sign-elements of any such code were often so slight and swift that they could hardly be detected, still less interpreted by uninitiated onlookers.  As the Eldar eventually discovered in their dealings with the Naugrim, they could speak with their voices but at the same time by "gesture" convey to their own folk modifications of what was being said.  Or they could stand silent considering some proposition, and yet confer among themselves meanwhile.

**Mahal** : the Dwarves' name for Aulë.

**Lord of Waters** : Ulmo.  Given the importance Dwarves place on true names, I doubt they would refer to and perhaps even think of the Valar by their right names.  (If anyone can point me to examples where they do so in Tolkien's writings, please do.)  Peoples who go to lengths to conceal their "true names" believe that command of a name gives power over the object (a presumptuous thought where the Valar are concerned) and that "naming calls."

**Pace** : I have estimated that a dwarven pace is about 22 inches, a bit less than six-tenths of a _ranga_ , or Númenorean yard (38 inches).  This is not quite proportional to their height, but the Men of the West are notoriously long-legged.

**Kail** ( _Brassica oleracea acephala_ ): a winter-hardy non-heading cabbage.

**Spade shoe** : a [rim of iron put on a wooden spade](http://www.ssplprints.com/lowres/43/main/54/133313.jpg); this was the usual type of spade well into the 18th century AD.

**Delf** : excavation; see "Dwarrowdelf" as a translation of Khazad-dûm.

**Alder** ( _Alder glutinosa_ ): a small tree, commonly found along water; its leaves and bark produce dye; the wood is water-resistant and attractive enough for furniture-making ("Scotch mahogany"); and it produces excellent charcoal.

**Grit** : in British geological terminology, a rough-textured sandstone suitable for grinding is called a grit or gritstone.


	7. Reap What You Sow

_I seek not what his soul desires._  
_He dreads not what my spirit fears._  
_Our heavens have shown us separate fires.  
_ _Our dooms have dealt us differing years._

_Our daysprings and our timeless dead_  
_Ordained for us and still control_  
_Lives sundered at the fountain-head,  
_ _And distant, now, as Pole from Pole._

\--Rudyard Kipling, "Two Races"

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * 

The emptiness of the cave felt strange, without even Gaernath's restlessness to disturb the deep quiet of the earth.  Where was the lad?  Would she ever learn what had befallen him?  Even without _raugs_ , the land between here and Srathen Brethil was wild and harborless.  Though it was some hours before dawn, Saelon surrendered to wakefulness.  Rising, she wrapped her shawl close about her head and shoulders, pausing only to put a few peats on the fire before stepping outside.

The wind was freshening, warm and salt off the sea, and the high moon turned the dappling clouds to silvery fish's mail.  The weather was changing at last.

She cast a glance along the cliff-foot towards the Dwarves' cave, but all was dark.  It would have been surprising if it was not.  All but Veylin had had a weary day, and labor was the friend of sleep.  She had hopes of sleep herself later, given the day before her.  The bere must be gotten in before rain fell, and the plot was more than twice as large as usual, sown with Gaernath's appetite in mind.  The digging of it had been laid on his youthful back, and she had expected his help at harvest as well.  There was no remedy for that void except to fill it with her own busyness.  The Dwarves had made it plain they had their own concerns—so be it.  If they had their work, she had hers.

Saelon banished the no longer familiar stillness in the cave with baking and brewing, using up the dregs of last year's corn, until there was light enough to go down to the sheep.  She debated shifting them from the machair to the river meads, where there was still high grass, but after casting a glance at the thick mare's tails overhead, their dusky violet brushed with the rose of the coming sun, she decided against it.  She might rue the time spent later.  Tomorrow, or when the Dwarves had gone, she could begin to restore the order of her days and the seasons.

She broke her fast with the milk and warm bannocks, waiting until it was bright enough to take Veylin's whetstone to the sickle, dulled on the woody stems of heather.  A single pass along the crescent of blade showed her why he had scorned the use of her stone.  This was a welcome gift indeed, and would save her precious time today.  Rekk and Oddi departed while she whetted, with no more than a short nod of acknowledgement as they passed.

Perhaps that was much.  At least it was something.

Drawing a stoup of water from the basin and kilting her skirt, she went to the corn.

Reaping was punishing work: stooping to cut the stalk close to the ground, for the length of the straw, and pausing only to twist a scant handful to bind the sheaf, leaving it to lay and moving on.  It had been a good season and the straw was thick and strong.  Saelon was glad, after a dozen sheaves, to hear an odd noise, a good excuse to straighten and ease her back.

Over in the dooryard, Thyrnir was taking an axe to the log she had dragged up from the beach.  Veylin sat nearby, hands busy with some small task.

Smiling, she bent back to her own.  Sheaf followed sheaf; mid-morning she stopped to drink and put a fresh edge on the sickle.  Thicker cloud was coming in from the west: already soaked with sweat in the warm, heavy air, she was glad not to have the sun beating down on her as well, but worried that rain might come before nightfall.  By midday, as near as she could judge through the grey roof of the sky, she had cut a very little more than half, but her back and arms were near rebellion.  She refilled her stoup and bolted some bannock and cheese; fed the fire and sharpened the sickle; then carried the cut sheaves into the byre-cave, stacking them in the far corner by her other stores.  It was reassuring to have so much safely in, but she must alternate reaping and carrying for the rest of the day, to ensure that little of what was cut would be soaked by a sudden shower.  The standing grain could bear the wet well enough.

It became a race against the sun's waning, both its fall from the zenith and the louring of dark-bellied cloud.  The expanse of stubble, muted gold, grew behind her; every sheaf was a few more days of bread.  So lost was she in the rhythm of the work that she stopped with a start when Thyrnir said for the second time, "Saelon?"

She straightened in surprise, and regretted the suddenness of the movement.  "Yes?"

He had refilled her stoup and passed it to her.  "Your pardon.  I see you have no time to spare.  Yet I need more timber, about as much again."  Reluctantly, he looked down on the bay: the surf was rising and the tide near high, leaden waves slapping the strand.  "As you said, the wood is very good."

She bowed her head in acknowledgment of his concession, then rubbed her aching neck.  "I will get more once the bere is in or the rain comes, or tomorrow morning."

"Will the weather permit it?" he asked dubiously.

"Yes."  She must remember they neither understood nor trusted the sea.  "The tide is ebbing now, and will be low this evening and again tomorrow morning.  There will be no difficulty."  Taking a draft from the stoup, she set it aside.  "I must get back to my task."

"Of course."  He bowed and withdrew.

The first light patter of rain caught her a half-dozen paces from the end.  Thrusting the sickle into her belt, she caught up an armload of sheaves and dashed for the cave; by the second armload, it was a fair shower.  Once the last sheaf was in, she stacked the dampened corn in a loose stook and turned to look out.  The rain was coming down like a curtain beyond the overhang of the cliff, a soft hushing drum of heavy drops.  Aching in every joint but well satisfied with the day's work, Saelon stepped out into the downpour, letting it sluice away the sweat-plastered grime and cutting flecks of straw.

She was discomposed, however, when she stepped back under the shelter of the cliff by her door and found Veylin on the bench, carving trenails.  "I am sorry you did not beat the rain," he told her.  "Will the loss be great?"

Was there a smile hidden behind that russet beard?  A puddle was forming at her feet, and her hair was draggled, dripping in her eyes.  Reaching up, she twisted it into a sort of order, wringing out more water.  "No.  What is still standing will not be so good for flour, but often it makes better malt for the soaking.  There is ample dry enough for long keeping, even with Gaernath's appetite."

Any suspicion of a smile vanished, and he set aside his knife and peg to take up a cup.  "Would you like a draught of mead?  You need it more than I, I think," he said, gazing at the spreading pool beneath her.

"It would be very welcome."  She had not meant the mention of the lad's name as a reminder or rebuke.  "Where is Thyrnir?"

"Seeking the makings of a fit supper.  We cannot expect you to keep slaughtering your beasts and fowls to feed us."

The mead was as sweet as she remembered, giving a grateful warmth, but she did not drink much.  Its smoothness was not innocent, and weary as she was, it would go straight to her head.  "It grows dark early with this rain," she observed, handing back the cup and gazing out into the gloom.  "I hope he does not go far.  My flock has never been so large—another beast would be little missed."

"Not far," Veylin assured her, "and warily.  I am more concerned about the others.  They are near to where the fiend attacked us."

"Surely they will be on their way back, with this weather."

"Perhaps."  His tone was like the shutting of a door.

Dwarves were known to be close with their business, but it did not take much wit to guess what they would be about, two stout Dwarves going out with picks and mattocks to where their kin had been slain, and returning weary and cross-tempered.  A fit grave could have been dug in less than a day.  From stone they came and to stone they returned, it was said.  Perhaps they were out of the storm.

"Maybe I will meet them as I go down to the sheep," she replied noncommittally.  "As it would be best to do before shifting into something dry," she added, looking down at her sodden state.  "My thanks for the mead."

Save for feeding the poor collie, even more sodden than herself, with no better shelter than a clump of whin, she might have saved herself the errand.  The best of the season was past, and with the milking erratic this last week, the ewes were going dry earlier than usual.  Half of what was in the bucket was rainwater despite the cover; the whole fit for little but pottage or brose.  She looked across the machair towards the dunes.  She had promised to get Thyrnir more wood, but her back and shoulders shrieked at the mere thought of dragging a log across the machair.  Or tomorrow, she had said; tomorrow would do.

The sea might be glorious tomorrow.

At the bottom of the track, she met Thyrnir trudging from the direction of the river, bent under some great burden.  When she saw what it was, she gaped.  With a complacent smile, he hoisted the salmon from the pad of leafy branches on his back for her inspection.  Even with both hands holding the stick through its gills over his head, the tail touched the ground.  "Good fishing you have here.  Will you join us for supper, lady?"

"Gladly."  She knew such fish frequented the lower reaches of the river, but she had no line that could have held such a monster, and they scorned the small weir that kept her in trout.  Feeling hollow after the day's labor, her mouth watered at the prospect of such a feast.

"You have not forgotten my need for timber?"

"No, I have not," Saelon sighed.  She considered the dunes once more.  "But my very bones ache.  Tomorrow will do?"

"It will," he relented, with no more than a hint of pity in his smile.

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

When she first woke, it seemed tomorrow would be worse rather than better.  On days such as this, Saelon doubted the strength of her Dúnedain blood; but if one was heroic enough to move and keep moving, the painful stiffness eased.

When she stepped outside and heard the roar of the waves below the keening of the wind, nothing could have kept her from the shore.

It was foul: not so bad as a winter gale, but a harbinger.  The west wind drove the rain against the cliff so that the overhang gave no shelter, and neither leather nor greased wool could long keep the wet out.  She had to twist her face down and sideways as she crossed the machair, into the driving sand and rain, salt now.  But when she struggled across the dune top and slid down its hissing face, her breath was taken by more than the wind.

Great grey-green waves strode towards the shore, foam-helmed, falling into curves too potent to be called graceful.  Where they struck the rocky headlands, fountains burst, blooms of spray fairer than may blossom.  Though the tide was at the ebb, so the surf broke far down on the foreshore, wide sheets of water raced up over the sands, driving the scudding foam before them.  The earth trembled underfoot; the pounding roar was like never-ending thunder—air and water and earth commingled in wild tumult, the play of the Powers.

How long she sat, entranced, she could not say; but the chill slowly crept in, even through layers of greased wool.  Getting up, she walked along the thick belt of wrack at the feet of the dunes, seeing what the sea had cast ashore.  Windrows of weed, good manure for her garden when it had dried enough to be less of a burden; bits and pieces of wood, many bleached and polished by sun and weather; strange shells and seeds, from who knew what land.  Finally she clambered back up the dune face, seeking the oak log she had stowed safely out of reach of the waves the night before last.

Wrestling it up the track warmed her, and she dropped it at the entrance to the Dwarves' cave with a virtuous glow of duty done.  They had blocked the higher part of the cut with heather to keep out the wind and blowing rain, while below a cloak had been hung as a door.  Stepping up, she called, "Did someone want wood?"

A moment later, Thyrnir drew the cloak aside enough to peer out, a shocked look on his face.  "Come in!" he urged, hardly looking at the log.  "You have been down to the sea?"  He might have been speaking of a dragon's lair.

Saelon could not help but laugh, and turned to seize the log.  "Do you want this or not?"

The red-bearded Dwarf nodded, dumbstruck.

Ducking beneath the heather, she hauled it far enough that Thyrnir could pull the rest in without going out into the rain.  "Saelon, are you mad?" Veylin exclaimed as she set it down and draped her streaming cloak over it, to keep as much water as possible out of their haven.  Craec, perched on a high ledge, drew his head from under his wing and cocked his head, blinking drowsily.

Pushing straggling hair back from her face, her hand came back smeared with creamy sea-foam.  "This?  The wind blows it everywhere."  Smiling at the two, she tried not to enjoy their horror too much.  "Do you think the sea is washing over the machair, or that I was sporting in the waves like the fish that breathes?"

"Who would know?" Veylin rumbled, displeased by her amusement.  "You are wet enough for either."

"I love to sit and watch the stormy sea," she said simply, without much hope of their understanding, "and see what it brings to shore.  Here—" Reaching into the bag slung over her shoulder, she drew out a shell like a large winkle, but delicate and purple as a spring violet.  "Have you ever seen such a shell as this?"

They stared at it.  "I do not think I have ever seen a shell aside from those of snails and river mussels," Veylin confessed.  "Pearls, yes; but not a shell from the sea."  After a moment, hesitant as if he were asking much, he hazarded, "May I handle it?"

Were they afraid of anything that came from the sea?  "Of course."  She passed it to him.

Not fear.  Veylin turned the open-ended spiral over and over, the touch of his blunt fingers as delicate as the shell, and held it between his eye and the lamp that lit his work.  "It is beautiful," he admitted, in almost grudging wonder.  "Like sculpted fluxspar."  He offered it back to her on the palm of his hand.  "Aside from pearls and nacre, I did not know the sea held such gems."

"Most shells are no better than river pebbles," Saelon dismissed.  "Pretty because they are polished and shiny with wet.  They fade like plucked flowers as they dry.  Yet I have never seen one like this before, with such a color.  If it pleases you, keep it."

"Lady," Veylin rumbled, bushy brows lowered in warning, "you are too open-handed."  He still held the shell out on his palm.  "I owe you too much already; I will not take more."

"Nonsense.  This is something I chanced upon, like an odd flower on the machair.  I am glad to have seen it, for it is beautiful, but no more so than other things.  Do what you will with it."

"You do not value it?" he asked, undisguisedly perplexed.

Saelon opened her mouth to answer . . . and then shut it again.  "I think we are talking at cross-purposes again," she reflected.  "I value its beauty, but beauty is brief.  As a thing, it has no use.  What would I do with it?"

"Keep it."

"To what purpose?"

"Because it is rare, and a pleasure to behold.  As a reminder of the sea."

She smiled.  "I have the sea itself.  Who needs a token?"

Veylin's gaze was grave as he ventured, "You may not always dwell here."

She looked on the shell.  "Then it would be a thing of bitterness and regret.  It would be better if it were a reminder to you, when you have gone, that there is wonder as well as dread in the sea."

He considered her as he slowly closed his fingers on it.  "I do not think I have ever met a Man like you."

"Alas," she sighed, cocking a sardonic eyebrow.  "I would fain meet such a man myself."

They stared at her as if she was fey, and under that unyielding incomprehension, her elation began to ebb.  "I have dampened your chamber enough," she observed, taking up her still-dripping cloak.  Was she storm-drunk?  Certainly she was not sober.  "I will leave you to your work.  If you need aught else, I will be at my hearth."

Saelon saw nothing of them the rest of the day, nor in the evening.  The rain beat down, reason enough to keep under a roof, but she sensed she had disturbed them deeply, even more than she troubled her own folk.  It grieved her, yet what was she to do?  She could understand their unease no more than they comprehended her joy in the waves, and to conceal it was impossible, an ingratitude.  In a day or two, they would depart, and then she would be free once more.

Save for the threat of the _raug_.

They and the weather were all gloomy alike in the morning.  The Dwarves had the best excuse: as she had gone out to her chores the evening before, she had heard them singing a deep dirge in their strange, harsh tongue, a reminder of what held them here.  Coming out in the grey light of what might have been dawn, she found Veylin seated on the litter, with Thyrnir arranging his cloak behind; Rekk was filling four water bottles at the spring basin.  Doucely, she approached Veylin.  "You are leaving?" she asked.

"For the day," Veylin replied, taciturn.  "Tomorrow we will depart for home."

She bowed her head and went about her business, but after they departed, she stood on the edge of the cliff shelf and watched their slow progress across the machair.  They would have a hard and dreary journey, bearing Veylin over the rough, heather-tussocked ground . . . and a longer after.  She wondered how far it was to their home.

And then she turned to her own difficulties.  Although she accomplished much with her hands that day, her thought made no more headway than the tide, marching back and forth across the same confined reach.  How could she stay?  She had seen what these things were capable of, and a league was nothing, a short tramp.  Halladan was not a timid man, nor these Dwarves either, save for the sea.  It did look like madness for her to ignore the counsel of tried warriors, a slender woman, alone, armed with no more than a faith in the ward of the wave and rowan-berries.  How far did that protection reach?  Was she right in thinking the _raugs_ were abroad only by night, or was that ill-founded hope?  Winter was coming, when the hours of light would be short, and twilight long.  How far would she be able to safely range for food and fuel?

Yet, how could she leave?  Even if she would, would it not be more perilous to set out, alone and afoot, across the mountains?  Halladan had said there was more than one _raug_ there; perhaps the one that had attacked the Dwarves had died of its wounds.  Fear oft drove folk into danger.

As the day waned, Saelon made a last effort of hospitality, preparing a good supper for her comfortless guests: the last of the dried venison made a hearty stew, and there had been a bounty of hazelnuts in the thickets by the river meads.  If they would not accept her generosity, that was their right; but she would not stint them.  Still, she often found herself going to look out over the machair, as if anxious for their return.  Foolishness . . . but though the wind had torn great rents in the clouds, and the sun shone fair on the green turf, glinting on the clinging drops from the last spit of rain, she found she was uneasy.

Too much brooding on the evil that might befall, casting a shadow as long and stark as the setting sun.  She turned her mind and body away, going down to the burn for butter.  It took some effort to fish the box out without getting drenched, with the water in spate after the storm.  Here, too, where she usually found peace, there was no reassurance; instead of the summer's easy chuckle, there was a rushing haste and the grumble of shifting stones.

Climbing back towards the cliff shelf, she started at a sound she had not heard for years.  Hooves; many hooves, galloping.  Saelon snatched up her skirt and bounded up the slope.  When she reached the crest, there they were: a line of horsemen racing onto the machair from the river, the leaders already swinging wide to circle something on the green turf.  Not her sheep—they were bolting for the northern headland, the collie running distracted.

A litter, surrounded by three Dwarves, their axes in their hands.

The lead horse was Halladan's roan; his helm was on his head and his spear in his hand.

Saelon dropped the butter and ran.

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

Notes

**Stook** : a collection of [sheaves set butt end down](http://www.hankelow.net/MyImages/BuildingStooks.jpg) to dry.

**Trenail** : wooden peg used to join timbers.

**Brose** : a peasemeal porridge (more commonly oatmeal, today) made with milk or stock.

**Weir** : a [fish trap](http://www2.mar.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fishmgmt/fm/images/fm32-e.jpg), usually an enclosure of posts or stones in a watercourse or tidal bay.

**"like a large winkle, but delicate and purple as a spring violet"** : a [violet sea-snail](http://www.gastropods.com/Shell_Images/G-L/Janthina_exigua_4.jpg) ( _Janthina exigua_ ), a pelagic snail sometimes washed ashore during gales.

**Fluxspar** : a term of my invention for [fluorite](http://www.mtgms.org/tnrocks/images/fluorite01.JPG), an easily carved mineral that comes in a wide range of colors and often used as a flux for smelting metallic ores.  Spar (from Old English _spærst?n_ , "gypsum") is a British term for lustrous, transparent to translucent non-metallic minerals with well-defined cleavage, such as fluorite.

**Nacre** : mother of pearl.


	8. Spears in the Sunset

Gáttir allar  
áðr gangi fram  
um skygnask skyli  
þvíat óvíst er at vita  
hvar óvinir  
sitja á fleti fyrir.

_At every door before you enter look around with care;  
_ _you never know what enemies aren't waiting for you there._

\--Jean Young's translation of _Gylfaginning_ ("The Deluding of Gylfi")

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * 

Veylin's heart, already ravaged by what they had laid to rest this day, burnt to black.  They were outnumbered, two to one.  These were tall Men on tall horses, with long spears in their hands; the other three Dwarves were afoot and weary from the burden he had become, while he could not even stand to face the foe.  Thyrnir had thrust his axe into his hands before taking his place at his back, but while the helve was a comfort in his grip, Veylin did not think he would get much opportunity to use it.  The horsemen had pulled up in a circle around them, spears leveled.  They were too far away for a sudden lunge that might grasp a spearshaft and dismount the rider—war-wise and wary.  And even if they could get them down from those great beasts, some of the Men were clad in mail, while his companions' had been left in the cave to lighten their burden.

Perhaps Oddi had been right.  Perhaps he had led them all to their deaths in this forsaken place.

Looking around at the faces behind the spears, seeking some weakness in the ring, Veylin was astonished to see one he knew, though the wild red mane had been braided back.  "Gaernath!" he exclaimed.  "Is that you, boy?"

The weight of menace shifted from the stability of the circle to rest, with all eyes, on him and the boy, less balanced by far.  Gaernath did not bear the pressure well.  "Aye," came his curt reply.  "Where is Saelon?"

Despite the hostility in the boy's voice, hope flickered up again in Veylin's heart.  "We left her at her work this morning.  She will be glad to see you.  _I_ am glad to see you," he assured that young face, whose nakedness so clearly showed a sense of betrayal.

The rider in front of the litter, blocking the line to the track, said, "You must be Veylin, son of Vali."

This was their leader: the tallest among them, with a fine old helm on his head.  The eyeguard was dwarf-work, and left only a grimly set mouth to read.  "I am."

"I am Halladan, lord of Srathen Brethil."

"Lady Saelon's brother?"

"The same."

Veylin set his axe aside.  "At your service," he told him gravely, with as much of a bow as he could manage seated on the litter, "and your family's."

"From what I hear, you should be.  Who are these others, who ambushed Gaernath and drove him into the wild?"

The implacable, judicial tone nearly quenched the spurt of hope.  Veylin remembered the cold, contained anger on Saelon's marked face when she had returned to the cave with Rekk.  This had much the same flavor.  "Kinsmen and friends who came seeking my companions and I.  They did not know then what foe they should seek."  How much of Saelon's forbearance had been politic, wisdom in a woman alone and unarmed?  Now that their lives were at the tips of her kinsmen's spears, she might not be so charitable.

To his left, Oddi stuck his axe in his belt and took a step closer to the spears.  Giving a short bow, he declared, "Gaernath, I am Oddi, son of Nidi, the archer who drew on you.  Do not be wroth with Veylin: he had no part in what we did, and scathed us for being unkind to those who had done him nothing but good.  For my part, the sight of my son's bow in your hand fired my grief and rage.  I have since heard of and seen the care you gave my son and his companions, and they strangers to you, not even Men.  Come with us to Lady Saelon's, so I may return to you, with a father's thanks, the bow that Veylin gifted you."

The boy was too tender for the strain.  He sat there, striving for a man's dignity while pleasure at Oddi's generous words warred with long-held anger on his face.  As his silence stretched on, one of the older Men prodded impatiently, "Speak, Gaernath.  Yea or nay?"  The little hair the Man had left was faintly tinged with red.  That Firebeard hue was uncommon in Men.  Was he close kin of the boy?

Resentment settled in the tight clench of Gaernath's jaw.  "You speak justly, Oddi son of Nidi.  Yet the last sight I had of my kinswoman, she was being dragged away.  I will take nothing from you until I have her good word."

"Do not lay that on Oddi," Rekk cut in, resting his axe at the ready on his shoulder.  Veylin's heart sank further: Thekk's brother could never understand that plain speech was not always a virtue.  "I am the one who had her by the hair.  If you attack a Dwarf, even bare-handed, you are fortunate to fare no worse.  And if you would spare your kinswoman the consequences of such courage, you should not leave her undefended.  In any case, the Lady Saelon and I have settled the misjudgment between us."

He had excelled himself this time.  Such a compound of high-handed distain and back-handed compliment—  Had Rekk been lovingly crafting this against just such an occasion these last three days?  If both his legs had been serviceable, Veylin would have gone over and knocked him down himself merely for that brutally clear image of Saelon in his clutch.

And her brother sat above them, his spearpoint toward their throats.  "You must allow me," he stated with ominous restraint, "to assure myself on that point."

Across the ring, one of the other mailed Men cleared his throat tactfully.  "Saelon comes," he observed.

She strode briskly across the turf, as poised as if she were entering a hall full of expected guests.  "Welcome, brother!" she called in cheerful greeting.  "And you other men of Srathen Brethil."  She was fighting to keep breathlessness from marring her dignity.  "I am glad to see Gaernath safe, though there was no need to bring him back in such state."

Her brother looked down on her and his face, if anything, grew more severe.  "Saelon," he demanded, "have these Dwarves mistreated you?"

Veylin found that he was holding his breath.

"They are my guests," Saelon declared, matching his austerity.  "I hope you will treat them with courtesy, brother."

She had not answered his question, and for a time they locked gazes and wills, neither yielding.  Veylin wondered which was the elder, and whether that made a difference among Men.

Abruptly, Halladan gestured brusquely to his men, and the spears were raised.  "Provided you can also be hospitable to your kin.  We have ridden hard for two foul days and risked the fell-beasts, only to find a mare's nest."

"Of course," she assured him soothingly.  "Come up to the cliff.  I think the byre-cave will hold all the horses, unless you prefer to sleep under cover yourselves.  My sheep have not been molested, here by the sea, so you may choose to leave the horses on the machair to graze.  Gaernath," she said, "could you please gather the flock back in?  Cut out the crook-horned wether, and perhaps Handir and Halpan can gather wood from the strand to roast him."

Halladan turned to the fair-haired Man on his left.  "You know the track, Tarain.  Take the others up.  We will camp in the large cave; the horses can come back down here.  I will join you as soon as I have had a word with my sister."

"Very good, lord.  Haldorn, Gede—this way."

The steel-toothed ring broke apart, some riding one way and some another.  Four rode for the caves, leading a fifth, riderless horse.  Only Halladan remained, reining his horse aside from their path before thrusting his spear into the turf.  "Masters," he said shortly, "pray continue on your way.  I would speak privately with my sister."

Veylin studied the two of them as the others put away their axes and took up the litter again.  On a trading venture to Dunland, he had once seen a Man beat his sister as if she had been a cur, merely because another Man had spoken lewdly to her; blaming her for the dishonor instead of his own lack of protection.  Saelon stood, arms crossed and head high in defiance, but when Halladan dismounted, she came no higher than his shoulder.  Fearing that she would again dare the wrath of the ready-handed in defense of others and her own honor, he hazarded, "This is your will, lady?"

Sister and brother turned to stare blankly at him, then the brother growled an oath and reached for his sword.  Saelon caught his arm, arresting him mid-stride.  "This outpouring of concern is unwonted," she cried out, with the same fey humor she had displayed the day of the storm.  "If I wanted you to slay each other, you would probably make friends!"

Halladan pulled off his helm, fixing Saelon with a furious glare.  "I came to punish your abusers, not to be accused of it myself!"

"Go," she asked them.

When Veylin glanced back, he was reassured to see that her brother held her against his breast, one dark head bowed over the other.

The terrace seemed full of Men and horses, even though half of them were still down on the plain.  They went straight to their delf, and once inside its comparative privacy, Oddi muttered in Khuzdul, "Abandoned by her kin?  Whatever possessed you, Rekk, to put that word-picture into their heads, and her still with the mark of your hand on her bare face?  They are not Dwarves, but they are jealous of their women's honor after their own fashion."

"You call that honor?  No dwarf-woman would have been so unprotected, or suffered such an insult if she were.  If her menfolk are unwilling to look after her, they have forfeited the right to take offense."

"No."  Thyrnir stepped between them, hands raised.  "Do not start.  This is no time to argue amongst ourselves.  Be glad it has turned out no worse so far, and keep your helms to hand.  Give me your bottles; I will go for water and judge the temper of the Men."

In sullen silence, Rekk set to work rekindling the fire while Oddi took stock of their provisions.  "What is their mood?" Veylin asked Thyrnir when he returned with full bottles and a pail of water for washing.

"Unfriendly, no more."  Thyrnir set down the pail and went to dry his wet hands over the fire.  "At least they have taken the horses away.  They are busy seeing to their own comforts."

"Saelon and her brother?"

"They are just coming up the track, and appear on good terms.  What do we have for supper?" he asked.  "With eight unexpected kinsmen at her board, we must not expect Saelon to feed us as well."

"There is waybread and salt beef enough," Oddi reported.

A grief-riven day; a grim evening; and now it looked like a cheerless night.  With Thekk and Vestri finally laid to rest, Veylin yearned for the security and comfort of his own hall.  He was coming to loathe this place.

Not long after they had cleaned off the mud and shifted into drier clothes, a tentative "Masters?  Are you within?" came from the passage.

Gaernath.  Thyrnir went to the curtain.  "We are.  What do you want?"

"May I speak with Master Veylin?"

"Come in, boy," Veylin called out, and sighed.

The great gangling child had to duck low to avoid the heather, and stopped just inside, shuffling his feet.  "I'm sorry, masters, to have brought you such trouble.  But it did look as if—"

"Yes," Veylin cut him short.  He was in no mood for apologies.  They mended nothing.  "It certainly did.  So much looks ill in this troubled world.  But I am still glad to see you safe.  Saelon has missed you very much."

The boy flushed and looked doubtful.  "She has given you all her good word, and asks if you will join her and her brother for supper."

_A ploy to draw us out?_ Oddi gestured.

_If they have decided to slay us_ , Rekk countered, _it would be easier to fire the passage._

"I will come," Thyrnir replied, pointedly ignoring the others.  "Uncle?"

"Of course."  _You two prefer salt beef in this hole?_

So they took themselves to Saelon's more spacious chamber, pulling their hoods off and bowing politely once they maneuvered the litter through the doorway.

"Thank you for coming," Saelon said, stepping forward to take their hoods.  "Let us start afresh.  Masters, this is my brother Halladan.  Halladan, here are my guests: Veylin and Oddi you already know by name; this is Rekk, and this is Thyrnir."

"Saelon thinks well of you, Master Veylin, which is praise indeed," Halladan said.  Stripped of his arms, he was a lean Man with the same strong, dark face as his sister, but it was deeply worn, and by more than two days on a perilous road.  "My sympathy for your losses."  He offered Veylin a cup of ale.  "It seems we share an enemy."

Veylin accepted the ale and drank, eyeing the Dúnadan over the rim.  "Saelon speaks as if there are many of these things."

"We have at least two, perhaps three," Halladan told him, as he went around serving the others.  "Our best huntsman has never seen the like of the tracks.  They have slain herdsmen and their beasts from Aegas Cerch to Cîl-en-Ostrad, and now that we are bringing the herds down for the winter, they have started attacking lone steadings.  No Man has seen one and lived.  What can you tell me of these slayers by night?"

The evening began to look more promising.  Aegas Cerch to the old road, and now one just north of here . . . these fiends were ranging across the whole width of the mountains, only two day's march from the mansion.  "Less than your sister," Veylin admitted regretfully.  "I took a blow to the head, and remember nothing of the attack.  It was a week before Rekk and Oddi reached the place, and by then all trace had been washed away by rain.  Apparently it was sorely wounded; perhaps that is why we have been left in peace since."

"Wounded?"  Halladan looked to Saelon, who was bringing a pot to the board.

"Their axes were clotted with foul black gore," she said tersely, "and it had left something hand-like behind: dun hide the corbies could not tear, talons as long as my fingers.  I have never seen a hand so large, though."

"Twice this size?" Rekk asked, holding his up as if to measure a span.

Saelon considered.  "Near enough."

Oddi grunted.  "Troll-sized."

Veylin shook his head.  "I told you the smell was wrong."

"What is this about the smell?" Halladan wanted to know.  "The hounds hate it."

"Troll-blood smells like stone, the dark green-grey one we use for road metal.  This was ranker, something like polecat musk."

"Where do the tracks lead?" Rekk wanted to know.

"Sit, please," Saelon told them, "or supper will get cold."

"To bogs, or shallow meres, where we cannot follow.  Saelon tells me you were attacked on a boggy moor."

They talked of the foe all through the meal, piecing together their scraps of knowledge.  Halladan told of their attempts to hunt them, with hounds and by staking out cattle, and in return listened to what they had to say on the finer points of troll-slaying.  Saelon followed it all with close attention, though she said nothing.  As they sat cracking still-warm hazelnuts to fill up the corners, Halladan asked, "So you have not seen such things before?  I had heard that your people have been here since the beginning of the world."

"Not quite," Veylin allowed, smiling, "but nearly."  Good venison stew, ale, and useful talk on vengeance had a wonderfully mellowing effect.  These Dúnedain might be as fierce as falcons, but they were not as arrogant as many lordlings he had met.  Halladan had already expressed an interest in acquiring a few troll-spears, to try what they could do.  This was a Man they could do business with.  "At least none of us—" he gestured at the other three "—have heard tell of creatures like this.  Perhaps we can learn more when we return home."

"You do not live nearby?"

"We dwell some way off, and were caught traveling."  Liking was one thing, but trust was another.  After all, he had been staring up the shaft of the Man's spear only a little while ago.

"Ah."  Halladan looked down the length of the board to where Saelon sat.  "I am sorry to hear that.  My mind—and heart—would be easier if my sister had neighbors such as you."

"You cannot mean to leave her here," Rekk exclaimed.

The Dúnadan continued to gaze at his sister, who sat unmoved, fingers steepled in front of her face.  "I would not leave her here," he agreed.  "There is a horse for her down on the machair.  But she will not go."

"Why not?" Thyrnir asked, curious.

"The more I hear," she said simply, "the more I am convinced that it is no safer in Srathen Brethil than it is here."

Her brother's mouth tightened, but he did not dispute it.

"But there you will have armed kinsmen between you and these fiends," Rekk told her.

Saelon turned a cold eye on him.  "You have seen the broken bodies of your dead," she replied, with a callousness the equal of his own.  "Dwarves, renown for their toughness and armed with weapons few of my folk can match.  What defense is that?  You put your faith in stone; I will put mine in the sea."

"You are a healer," Thyrnir pointed out.  "You preserved my uncle's life.  Do your own folk not need such service?"

"They may need it, but they do not desire it.  Fortunately, there is another woman there almost as skilled."

"Are they fools?"  Veylin was incredulous, then, catching Halladan's scowl, hastily added, "Present company excepted."

"I see why you get along with these Dwarves," her brother observed dryly.  "They do not mince words either."

"Not fools, exactly.  I do not see things as they do, and we grate on each other."  Saelon shrugged.  "It is kinder to us all for me to keep apart."

Looking at her brother's face, Veylin had his doubts about that.

"Or is it that you will not leave the sea?" Thyrnir suggested.

Halladan regarded him strangely.  "They are of your mind about the sea," Saelon told him.

"Ah."  He shook his head.  "I have debated with her on this for a score of years, masters.  I do not think you will change her mind in one night.  What is the use of argument once a woman's heart is given?"

To the sea?  That was a strange thought.  Yet, was it all that different from his devotion to gems?  For the fire opals in his pouch, Veylin had dared to approach the sea, and despite the death of his friend and his apprentice, he was still contemplating a new home away from his kin, closer to his heart's desire.

"None," Oddi declared with the certainty of a married man.  Rising, he bowed to Saelon.  "A fine supper, lady.  We have a long road tomorrow and ought to make an early start."

"I will not press you to stay, then.  A good night to you all, and a fair morning."

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The morning did promise to be fair as they and the Men prepared to leave.  The Dwarves kept to their side of the terrace as they went through their packs one last time: Veylin, litter, mail, and the contents of half a dozen packs to be borne by three made a heavy load.  Oddi had ventured among the stamping horses in Saelon's dooryard only long enough to find Gaernath and present him with Vestri's bow, as promised, the broken bowstring made good from his own.

As the Men strapped their saddlebags and blankets onto their mounts, Halladan walked over.  "Good morning, masters," he greeted them.  "I do not know which way you are heading, but if you would care to keep us company for part of your journey, you would be welcome."

"A kind offer," Veylin said, glad to take his attention from the discussion about whether some of the tools might be left behind and, if so, whether they might retrieve them later.  "We cannot keep up with your horses, however."

Halladan smiled.  "I suppose not.  Would you ride?  Can you, with your leg?"

"I would not ride one of those great beasts even if both legs were sound," Veylin emphatically objected.  "Ponies are one thing, but a horse's back is too far from the ground."

"Even if you would slow us, we would still value your company," Halladan maintained, courteously passing over the unwelcome suggestion.  "Your weapons bite these fell-beasts.  My men would rest easier at night for the assurance.  As for speed, some of us might spell your folk at the litter.  I would take a turn to talk with you further."

Very flattering; but even if they trusted to Men to carry some of the gear on their horses—and him!—they would probably make better time heading directly for the mansion.  Veylin was calculating whether it might be worth some lost time for better relations with the lord of Srathen Brethil when someone bellowed, "Gaernath!  Where are you?"

Veylin and Halladan both looked towards the shout.  It was the Man with the faded hair, standing, reins in hand, in the middle of Saelon's dooryard.

"Here, father."  Gaernath was over by one of the younger Men; they seemed to have been debating the merits of the dwarven bow.

"Where is your horse?  Why are you not ready to go?"

The boy frowned.  "I am not going," he said.

"You most certainly are," his father declared, taken aback and scowling, "and you are delaying us.  Hurry and make ready."

"I promised Halladan I would look after Saelon, and in any case I was to stay for a year," Gaernath protested.  "The year is up at Yule."

"The agreement was for Yule because that was when Halladan would fetch you.  You are needed at home, with Mais newly married and the worry over these fell-beasts.  Now, do as you're told."

Beside him, Halladan's face was closed, giving no opinion of another man's dealings with his son.  Looking for Saelon, Veylin saw her on the far side of the dooryard, where she had been serving bannocks and drink to the riders; she, too, was silent and still.

With every eye on him, Gaernath said, "No."

His father stared as if the boy was a hound that had snapped at him.  "What did you say?"

"No.  I am staying."

"Are you a coward?" his father demanded in angry incomprehension.  "Do you think to hide from the fell-beasts here?"

"There is a fell-beast here, too," Gaernath bit back, voice rising.  "I raised a cairn over those it slew—and rode to Srathen Brethil through the land they haunt, because I thought Saelon needed rescue.  No man can call me a coward, and I will not leave Saelon to face such a threat alone!"

Now his father turned cold.  "Then you are a fool, or as mad as she is.  Lis said no good could come from letting you stay with her.  I should have listened to her.  Bred," he ordered the Man by his side, "go fetch his horse and saddle it.  It will go home, even if he will not."

Bred mounted and rode down the track.  The other Men were suddenly occupied with small business of their own: checking girths, fetching their spears, or surveying the nearly cloudless sky, brightening to blue overhead.  Rekk sniffed and muttered, "The child knows his duty, at least."

From the look Halladan gave him, Veylin knew those two would never be friends.  "We are flattered by your offer," Veylin told the Dúnadan, "but the inconvenience would be great to us both, I think.  I will look for someone willing to take the troll-spears to Srathen Brethil, however, and if I am better able to travel in the future, I will come to see you myself."

"I would like that."  Yet the Man's face was disappointed and discontented.  He gazed across the dooryard, to where Gaernath had gone to stand by Saelon.  "I would like it even better if you were able to look in here on your way."

"I owe your sister a great debt," Veylin acknowledged.  "I will not forget it."

Halladan was just clasping his shoulder in wordless thanks when one of the young Men came up; the one who had been talking to Gaernath.  "Halladan, I'm of a mind to stay myself.  Would I be welcome, do you think?"

"Gaernath would be glad of your company, I am sure."

"Would Saelon, though?"

"Ask her," Halladan advised.  "How does your brother feel about this, Halpan?"

"Oh, I have his blessing," Halpan said with a grin.  "I would not raise ill feelings between the two of you.  The ride home will be unpleasant enough with Gede in a foul temper."

"It that why you are abandoning us?" Halladan jested.  "Go and get my sister's blessing then, or you may find it more unpleasant here."

"Will she have him?" Veylin asked when Halpan strode off.  This one was full a man, he judged, though still young, and closer kin, Dúnedain-dark and tall.

"For Gaernath's sake, probably.  For her own, she would as soon see the backs of all of us, I expect."  Though he shook his head, Halladan looked less displeased.  "So I had best get my men moving."  He held out his hand.  "May you have an uneventful journey, and come safe home."

Veylin accepted his handclasp.  "The same to you.  Good hunting."

The Dúnadan smiled grimly.  "Many thanks."

They rode out as they had come, a close-ordered line with a single riderless horse.  Halladan had left the other for Saelon, a return for her pony.  Perhaps to distract the boy from his father's leavetaking, Halpan was urging Gaernath to fetch the beast and show him the country round about; they might get some venison as well.  "Take it and go," Saelon told them, with a dismissive wave of her hand.  "Do not think you can lounge about here, with me waiting on you hand and foot.  If you want good suppers, keep my larder full!"

Once the two went down with Halpan's horse and the harness for the other, Saelon came over to them.  "And now you are off as well," she observed.

Veylin nodded.  "I fear you have been long wanting us gone."  They had spoken little since she had given him the shell, between his disquiet over her strangeness and the necessities of mourning, but neither had she taken the opportunity to say much last night.

"Yes and no.  A little dullness, if fate will grant it, would be very welcome.  If you come this way again, however, I hope you will stop by.  I would welcome news of you."

"You have not seen the last of me," he warned lightly, glad that she had not taken offense at his distance.  "I still owe you much."  Looking around, he saw the others had drawn off, so as not to disturb them with the renewed wrangling over the fate of the pick and mattock.  Gesturing her closer, he added quietly, "A word, for your ear alone."

"Yes?" she murmured, drawing nearer.  She tweaked at the brace on his leg as if it dissatisfied her.

He cocked an eyebrow at the familiarity, but let it pass.  "I must return home for a time, yet soon we may be neighbors.  Not too near," he assured her, "but perhaps close enough at need."

"In days such as these, that would be a gift.  Go safe home, and come again when you may."

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Notes

**_Gylfaginning_** : this part of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda is the source of much of our knowledge of Norse mythology, and also includes the _Dvergatal_ , the list of dwarf-names Tolkien mined for _The Hobbit_.  Young's translation is almost criminally free, but I've always found the idea that enemies might _not_ be waiting intriguing.  For the purist, a more literal—but less relevant—translation (Brodeur 1916) would be "All the gateways/ Ere one goes out/ Should one scan/ For it is uncertain/ Where sits the unfriendly/ On the bench before thee."

**Firebeard** : one of the seven kindreds of the Dwarves, whose ancestors (with those of the Broadbeams) woke in the northern Ered Luin (HoME XII: _The Peoples of Middle-Earth_ , p. 301).

**Wether** : a castrated male sheep; they produce more and better wool than ewes.

**"stone, the dark green-grey one we use for road metal"** : [gabbro](http://geology.com/rocks/pictures/gabbro.jpg), a tough igneous rock often used for road construction.


	9. Storm-Driven

      Chaidh a' chuibhle mun cuairt, _The wheel has come full circle,  
_ ghrad thionndaidh gu fuachd am blàths: _warmth has suddenly turned cold.  
_       gum faca mi uair. _But once I saw here a bountiful castle,  
_ Dùn ratha nan cuach 'n seo thràigh, _well-stocked with drinking-cups that have  
                                                                                      now gone dry,  
_      far 'm biodh tathaich nan duan,                    _a song-haunted place abounding in  
                                                                                      good things,  
_iomadh mathas gun chruas, gun chàs: _given without stint or question.  
_       dh'fhalbh an latha sin uainn, _That day has gone from us,  
_ 's tha na taighean gu fuarraidh fàs.                     _and the buildings are chill and desolate._

\--Roderick Morison, " _Oran do Mhacleòid Dhùn Bheagain_ " (Song to MacLeod of Dunvegan)

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * 

Two lads were less trouble than one.  Saelon seldom saw them except at meals: they moved into the Dwarves' cave and spent all but the wettest days riding over the country.  Patrolling, Halpan maintained, seeking sign of fell-beasts; but they seldom came back without meat for the table, game or fowl or fish.  It was a pleasure to reward them with fine meals and laugh at Halpan's tales at the board.  He was a pleasing fellow, who took Gaernath's manly education in hand with a light touch, yet it did not take long to see that he had a restless heart.  He loved the sea for its strangeness, and told her of the bays and hills and glens up and down the coast with delight.

He would find it hard to stay within the narrow bounds of Srathen Brethil.  Perhaps that was the real reason he had remained here.

With no further hint of _raugs_ , the autumn passed with its usual sweetness, the pleasure enriched by anticipation of winter's pitilessness.  Saelon laid in a great store of hazelnuts, threshed the corn, and spent a long, strong-smelling day digging ramps to season stews to come.  When the weather turned foul, Halpan and Gaernath tried their hands at stoneworking with the mattock the Dwarves had left, carving a great kist out of the wall in the byre-cave.  It was a crude thing, and no doubt the Dwarves would have laughed at it, as they did themselves, but it foiled the gnawing teeth of mice, which was all she wished.

Narbeleth was sobbing to its close, raw with damp and rising wind, and Saelon was gazing down over the machair, weighing how much rawer it would be on the shore against the warmth and savor of the chowder she might make, when movement caught the corner of her eye back near the river.  The lads had planned on riding to the oakwood today.  What could bring them back so soon?

It was not the lads on their long-legged steeds, but four heavily laden workhorses, one with a small boy perched on its packsaddle, led by three weary women.  A larger boy drove a straggle of sheep and kine.

Pausing only to fill the largest pot with water and set it on the fire, Saelon hurried down the track to meet them.  "Urwen!" she exclaimed in dread when she recognized the woman leading the first horse.  "What is this?  What has happened?"

"Oh, Saelon," Urwen cried, stopping dead with exhaustion or relief, tears welling up.  "What has not happened?  Please, will you take us in?"

"Of course!"  Saelon looked them over, bewildered and frightened.  Urwen; Halpan's sister Bereth, with Urwen's little Morwen slung at her breast; Eithel, Handin, and Hanadan.  Only the husband and eldest boy were missing.  "Where is Haldorn?  And Handir?"

"Dead.  Slain by those night-demons."  Urwen's voice was sere as the last leaves.

"Both?"  Saelon drew Urwen into her arms, for what comfort it could give and to warm her, and was further shocked to find her big-bellied.  What would send this tough-minded woman across _raug_ -haunted mountains at this season, afoot, unescorted, and in her condition?  "The creatures have come to Srathen Brethil?"

Bereth came up, shushing Morwen, who had begun to cry at her mother's distress.  "Aye," she confirmed, too weary for much grief.  "As far south as Craigenthôr.  One broke into Frest's byre, and Haldorn took our men to help.  Naugton told us only the swords of the old days bite on the monsters."

Dwarf-wrought, no doubt, from the days when their house could afford such things.  So Haldorn, mailed and with the only weapon that could harm a _raug_ , would have closed with it.  Saelon stared beyond Bereth at the others, willing the memory of the gore-soaked moor from her mind.  "But why have you come here?  Surely Halladan would have taken you in.  Why are there no men with you?"

"Of course—but Urwen would not stay."

Urwen shook her head violently, clutching at Saelon's shoulders.  "Blood," she moaned, shuddering.  "All blood."

"Help me get her up to the cliff," Saelon told Bereth.  "We must get her warm—and the rest of you, too.  You can tell the tale later.  What is that on the cattle?"

"Corn.  Urwen stripped the storehouse."

Bereth said it as if it were further proof of shattered wits, but it gave Saelon a glint of reassurance.  Trust Urwen to figure that she would not have enough to feed six more mouths through the coming winter and do what she could to remedy it.  "Eithel, take the load off that horse and let's get her up.  Someone can come down for the goods later.  Handin, the sheep will do well here.  Bring the cattle up after us so we can unload the corn."

"Where is Halpan?" Bereth wanted to know.

"Hunting with Gaernath.  They may not be back until near nightfall."

"Are there fell-beasts here?" Hanadan asked in a small voice as they led his mother back to the unladen horse.

"Not by the sea, honey," Saelon assured him, pausing long enough to give his hand a quick squeeze.  "Can you hear the sea?"

"What does the sea sound like?"

"That noise like distant thunder over there.  Hear it?  Fell-beasts are frightened of it."

"Really?"

"Really?" Eithel echoed her youngest brother hopefully, holding the horse steady as Saelon and Bereth boosted Urwen onto the broad back with as much care as possible.

"Yes, really."  She hoped her faith was true, for their sakes.

After all that had happened a few weeks back, it was not so difficult to muster food and beds for unexpected and overwrought guests.  When the lads returned, Gaernath dealt with the sacks of corn and introduced the collie to his new charges, leaving Halpan to mourn with what remained of his brother's family.  They got the bones of the tragedy that night, mostly from Bereth.  Having brought her children and her husband's sister to safe haven, Urwen sat huddled in a cocoon of blankets, fire-heated stones at her back and feet, silent tears trailing down her face as she cradled her heavy belly.

Losing a much-loved husband and eldest son in one night, to such a thing, would have been ample cause for most women to lose their wits for a time, but Urwen was a proud daughter of Emyn Uial and had borne her bereavement with the stoicism befitting a Dúnedain matron.  According to Bereth, it had only been when Núneth, Halladan's wife, had pressed Urwen to join them in their hall that she had fled back to her cold hearth and started packing all that could be strapped on a beast, deaf to reason.  Halladan had sent Tarain and Naugton with them, but the men had been anxious to return to the defense of Srathen Brethil.  Urwen had released them as soon as the party had reached the head of the river that morning, since there was no danger of them losing their way.

Having fled from Núneth herself, Saelon was less inclined to see Urwen's flight as proof of madness than Halpan and Bereth, although the tale gave her a cold sense of foreboding.  With the assurance of her own high lineage, Urwen had always been able to laugh at Núneth's striving affectations.  Of course Urwen could not defend herself so now, but she might have simply stayed in her own home and sent for Halpan.  Her muttering about blood may have only been the too-vivid memories of a woman who had pushed herself beyond her limits.

Or it might have been something more.

In the morning, when she stepped outside to fill the stoup at the rock basin, Halpan crossed her path, his saddlebags over his arm.  "Saelon," he said briskly, "pack me some food for the road."

"Where are you going?" she asked, though one of the little ones could have guessed the answer.

"I must go back to Srathen Brethil."

"Why?"

His look was dismissive, impatient.  "Halladan will need every man."

Saelon took his arm as he turned back towards the byre-cave.  "Do not be so heedless," she rebuked him sharply.  It had been a bad night, with half a dozen wailing night terrors among the newcomers, women and children.  "It is foolish to risk meeting a _raug_ on the way."

"If they are deviling Srathen Brethil, they will not be on the road.  If Gaernath could do it on your old garron, Dûnsûl and I can."

"Then give some thought to Bereth, and your brother's widow and children.  Would you leave Handin as their protector?"

"You and Gaernath will look after them."

She set a fist on her hip and fixed him with her sternest gaze.  "How am I to feed them all without you?"

"Gaernath—"

"Is a better hunter than he was a month ago, but not good enough."

"How do you know I am not needed there more?" he demanded hotly.

She wondered if this was youth's reckless desire for renown or a warrior's judgment of their defense.  "Have you seen those slain by these things?" she countered.

He was silent for a breath.  "Yes."

"A sword of Arthedain and mail did not save your brother.  How should you fare better?"

His face was bleak.  "I fear for Halladan.  Let me go."

A shrewd thrust, to the heart.  Hearing it from another fed her foreboding, gave it substance.  "Is Urwen foresighted?"

"I do not know.  I have never heard so.  But what else could have driven her from home in this wild way?"

Saelon gazed out over the waves, striving to drown the ghostly mutter of dread.  After a time, Halpan hesitantly asked, "Are you foresighted?  Is that why you do not want me to go?"

She shook her head.  "No."  Would surety be better or worse?  If Urwen had foreseen . . . some doom—she would not even think it, lest she call it—knowledge did not seem to have reconciled her to fate.

"Then why are _you_ here, rather than at home?  You are neither witless nor astray, no matter what some say."

The uncertainty was terrible, like floundering in a bog: too thick to shake free, but too thin to push away.  "The sea speaks to me," she confessed, the only firm hold she had to offer him.

"What does it say?"

No one understood.  "It does not speak in words.  Do you think Ulmo comes to me, as he came to Tuor?" she fleered in self-scorn.  "I am not sure if these are—promptings, or my own fancies.  If I was sure, do you think I would not have warned you all?"

He stepped back from the snap of her frayed temper.  "If we would have heeded you," he answered quietly.  He gazed down at his saddlebags, then at the doorway of her cave; Morwen could be heard crying inside.  "You advise me not to go."

Saelon sighed.  She should not have told him; now he would put too much weight on her words.  "I cannot cope with these frighted strays without the help of someone who has kept their wits.  Please," she asked.  "Stay."

"And Halladan?"

"If warning it was," she replied, choosing her words with care, as if one could tiptoe past fate, "he will read it as well as ourselves.  Whatever he can do to avoid evil, he will."  She hoped Veylin had found someone willing to carry troll-spears to Srathen Brethil.  She wished a long shaft between her brother and those things.

"He will not," Halpan contradicted grimly.  "He will put himself between it and our folk."

"The lord of Srathen Brethil could do no less."  He must find his own way through, since he could not make friends with the sea.  "I know you would put yourself between him and this evil," she granted, "and I thank you for it, but consider.  Might he have sent your kin here to you, since they would not accept his protection?"

Morwen had begun to shriek, and he grimaced.  "You ask much."  He weighed his saddlebags in his hand.  "I will think on it."

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 He thought on it that day, and the next, and the next, until it was plain he would stay.  Urwen remained so listless and quiet that Saelon feared she had taken ill, or that something was wrong with the babe, but she had no fever and after a week began to slowly turn outward again.  A mixed blessing—for while it meant that Morwen cried less, a great relief to them all, Urwen's will was as masterful as her own.  She was fretted by grief and exhaustion, her growing belly and her dependence on a woman she had been used to pity.

Coming back in from the garden one fine brisk morning, Saelon found Urwen had opened some of her bags and was sorting clothing.  "What are you doing?" she asked, offering friendly interest.

"Trying to restore some order to my life," Urwen replied in a distracted mutter, folding a small tunic and adding it to a pile.  "The snows will be here soon.  There seems to be enough warm things for the boys, but I will have to make some winter gowns for Morwen."

"Do you have the cloth you need?  If not, I have some good woollen.  Enough for Morwen, and a wrap for the babe to come.  Or—" Saelon offered, for Urwen made the finest cloth in Srathen Brethil, far finer than her own "—if we can find room, we can set up the loom, and you can weave your own."

"Thank you, but I have what I need."

The stiffness under the polite words was a rebuff as brittle as old glass.  It would have been one thing if Urwen preferred the calm of silence as Veylin had, Saelon reflected, adding the kail and carrots to the fish stew.  Only yesterday, however, she had overheard Urwen complaining to Bereth of her coolness.  It was hard to keep making overtures when they were unappreciated, but in charity she tried again once she brought out the quern and started grinding for the evening's bannocks.  "It will be a blessing that winters are not so cold here: we rarely have snow, or even frost," she told her, for what comfort it might give.

"Such a kindly place," Urwen replied, her smile with an edge like the dwarven knife.

Did the woman think she was crowing over her?  Flaunting her wisdom in settling here?  "Instead we have great storms of wind, that you cannot stand up in.  They last for days sometimes."

Urwen looked around the small cave, clearly imagining what it would be like for the nine of them to be penned together in such a place.  She shook out and refolded four shirts, however, before saying, "You have been so good to take us in, Saelon, but is there somewhere else we might house?  I fear we are sadly in your way, especially the children."

Why especially?  Because she had none of her own?  Truth be told, Saelon preferred the company of Handin or Hanadan to that of their mother, or even Bereth.  Perhaps it was because their words didn't have one meaning on the surface and another lurking beneath.  No wonder men thought women treacherous.  "You have seen what is here," she replied matter-of-factly, refusing to take offense.  If Urwen insisted on seeking triumph in her words, she would not satisfy her by placing it there.  "We might move the stores into the Dwarves' cave, so you could have the whole of the byre-cave.  It is the largest."

"The byre-cave?" Urwen exclaimed with distaste and a perilous note of insult.

They were saved by the door drape lifting.  Halpan looked in.  "Saelon?  We would like to consult you about something.  Can you come?"

What was it now?  Dusting the flour from her hands, she rose, frowning.  The Dwarves might have been as prickly as Urwen, but at least they had been less bothersome.  Her kin seemed helpless without her direction.  "On what?"

Halpan only answered when she had stepped out to join him, and then too low to be heard within.  "Halladan has sent us more folk from Srathen Brethil."

"More?" she echoed, in double dismay as he led her along the shelf: that things must be worsening there, and that they should be even more crowded here.  "How many?"  They would have to clear the byre-cave.

"Three."

"Three?  Who?"  Only a few of the cottars had households so small.  Unless this was another shard of a shattered family.

"Saelon."  A short brown man, bald on top, stepped from inside the byre-cave and took her hand.  "Your brother sends his greetings."

"Partalan!" she cried in surprise, clasping his burly hand warmly.  "How is he?  Whom have you brought us?"

The bearded warrior's gaze was stolidly grave.  "He is as well as he could be, when things are so ill in Srathen Brethil."

"Have they grown worse?  Bereth said the fell-beasts were as near as Craigenthôr."

"Nearer now."  Partalan drew her to the mouth of the cave, so she could see his charges.

Rian, standing bravely tall, came forward to claim a kiss.  "Saelon," she greeted her.  "Father sends his love, and says you are to teach me to make great-grandmother's heather ale."

She held her niece fiercely close, as if it would crush the foreboding that suddenly flared to life, and threw a hand out towards the lad, who hung back.  "And you, Halmir?  Have you no greeting for your aunt?"

He was at the awkward age, discontented and resentful, but came dutifully for a kiss.  "Thank you for harboring us," he muttered, in a tone that brought Urwen back to mind.

"You would rather have stayed with your father, I think," she said, gripping his shoulder.  He was already over-topping her.  He had his mother's fairness of face and raven-black hair, but otherwise he reminded her of her brother when he was a sulky boy, not quite fledged.

"Yes."

"Then I thank you for coming.  It was good of you to guard your sister on the way; and I sorely need help caring for Urwen and the others.  Will you aid Halpan with his work?"

He nodded sullenly.

"Come, then," Halpan said, clapping him on the shoulder.  "Let's see to the horses.  You have Môrfast, I see.  How did you convince your father to let you have him?"

Saelon leaned back to get a better look at the horses.  There were six: three for riding, and three laden with kists and bundles.  One mount was that great black stallion, the best blood-horse this side of the Emyn Uial and her brother's pride.  He had sent her his stud as well as his children.  Her heart clenched.  He would not have sent those dear ones away, not if he still had hope of the future.  Or at least of a future there, in Srathen Brethil.

Rian's eye was on her, Dúnedain-keen, no longer that of a child.  "Halpan," Saelon called, as Partalan went to help with the beasts.  There was work to do, and that would muffle care.  She must keep her brother's trust, and hold them all safe for him.

When Halpan joined them, she gave him a wry, weary smile.  "Tomorrow we will need to clear this for your family.  Urwen is chafing at my hearth, and a dozen in that small space is far too many.  I will leave it to you, but dump the dung onto the garden and corn plot.  Once it's down to stone, the children can haul water from the burn and splash it clean, so Urwen has no cause to wrinkle her nose.  A good driftwood fire will dry it out quickly afterwards.  I'm afraid," she said, with a rueful sigh, "that you lads will have to give up the Dwarves' cave to the stores."

He shook his head dismissively, his eyes as worried as hers.  "I will see to it," he assured her, and glanced at Rian.  "Can you weave wattle, cousin?" he asked, mustering a lighter smile.

"If the choice is between that and shoveling dung," Rian said decidedly, "I can weave it very well."  She turned back to Saelon.  "Tell me how I can be of use."

"Come and finish grinding the corn while I start the bannocks.  Keep Urwen in passable humor for a few more days, if you can, and," she promised, "I will teach you the secrets of good heather ale as soon as she is safely out of hearing."

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 Perhaps because she was used to her mother's uneven temper, Rian bore Urwen's irritation with such sweet grace that Saelon forgave her for her unhandiness at much of the household work.  It was not the girl's fault that her mother had thought milling and digging dung into the garden too low for the lord's daughter, and at least she was willing to try.  But in the end Saelon found it was simpler to do much of the rough work herself and leave her niece to spin and sew beside Urwen, who praised the fineness of her work.

On a blustery day of sharp showers in early Girithron, after a hard morning carrying wrack from the shore to the garden, it was a relief to sit alone at her hearth, roasting hazelnuts to crack for the next day's pottage.  She had been hindered more than helped by Hanadan, who insisted on showing her every fragment of shell he could find amongst the weed as he helped fill the baskets.

Life was finally falling into a pattern again.  The men and lads divided their days between the hunt and training at arms; Partalan was far from satisfied even with Halpan's skill, and drilled Halmir and Gaernath with stern rigor.  Handin was judged too young and had taken Gaernath's position as herdsman, while Hanadan would attach himself to whomever seemed to be doing something interesting and distract them with his curiosity.  A sweet child, but often a vexing one.  Unless Saelon pressed for help with whatever tasks she thought were needful, the women and girls would gather in Urwen's cave, once the meals were attended to, and spend the day spinning and weaving and sewing, as if they were still in their hall at Srathen Brethil.

Wondering why Partalan did not play his harp in the evenings—it sat in its case there, on the high ledge—Saelon was fighting off creeping drowse beside the fire's warm glow when there came a brusque rap at the doorframe.  "Yes?"

Partalan thrust the drape aside, holding it for a tall figure in a sodden cloak, a helm in his hands.

Saelon flew to her feet and started forward, heart leaping with a relief as dire as pain.

Leapt, and fell.

"Tarain," she breathed, as he shoved back his hood to reveal fair hair.  Seeing the man's harrowed face, she knew her fears had all come true.  "He is dead."

Was it rain or tears on his gold-stubbled cheeks?  "Yes, lady."  He held out her brother's helm.  "He wished you to have this."

Its elegant curves gleamed in the lamplight like silver.  She had never seen it shine so.  Too clean; oh, far too clean.  "That should go to Halmir," she objected, as he set it in her hands.  The boar on its crest looked like the one that had slain their father, snarling defiantly even in death.

Tarain shook his head, flinging water from the straggling ends of his hair.  "I am to give him the sword," he replied doggedly, "to strengthen his arm, but his father said he is too young for this.  You are the eldest surviving of your house, lady.  He insisted that you hold the lordship in trust for his son."

Eldest surviving—Núneth, and her sister Minuial; they were dead as well?  She clutched the helm so hard that its edges bit her palms, fearing that it would slip from her hands otherwise.  "Lordship?" she echoed hollowly.  "Over two broken families."

"More are on their way, lady."

"More?"  Oppression cracked the ice of her despair.  "How many more?"

"Mais and what is left of his kin—"

"Gede?"

"Dead beside his lord.  But Maelchon has brought his family safe away."

"None of the lesser folk?"

Tarain shook his head.  "So many have fled these last weeks, lady, to the east for the most part.  Only a few held to their oaths.  Aniel has sworn to pursue these things to the death, even if he loses his last hounds, but his brother has convinced him to come."

Beautiful dogs, with tapered muzzles and swift feet.  So much lost.  "Can you number them for me?" Saelon pleaded.

As he told them over on his fingers, she dimly noticed they were blue-nailed, trembling with cold.  "In all, near thirty," Tarain finally concluded.

Thirty more?  Nienna, how was she to bear this? "How soon will they be here?"

"Tomorrow, should no ill befall."

She stared at him.

"No further ill," Partalan amended for him softly, setting his hands on their shoulders and steering them both towards the warmth of the hearth.

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Notes

**Foresighted** : the foresight some Dúnedain (such as Gilraen, Aragorn's mother) have sounds very similar to the Second Sight, a "gift" Highlanders were noted for.  Since most forevisions were of death and woe, it was not something people desired, and its possessors were usually melancholy people.

**Cottar** : Scots, someone holding a cottage and small plot of land in return for labor services.

**Nienna** : one of the Valar, sister of Mandos and Lórien; her song is lamentation, but "she brings strength to the spirit and turns sorrow to wisdom."


	10. Measure for Measure

_It is the nature of men to be as much bound by the benefits that they confer as by those they receive._

\--Niccoló Machiavelli, _The Prince_

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"What is this?" Veylin muttered, as their ponies crested the hill and they looked down on the cliff-backed plain.  It was well-stocked with black cattle and sheep, and a few horses were gathered in the corner nearest the track to Saelon's cave.

Thyrnir shaded his eyes, peering towards the further cliff.  "There is something pale up there," he observed.  "A great deal of washing, or booths.  I can't be sure from here."  Looking at Veylin, he asked, "Do we go on?"

"Of course."  Veylin urged his beast forward, to pick its way down the heather-clad slope.

As they reached the plain and drew near the cattle, children broke from cover like grouse: two flew off towards the track with light-footed speed, while a half-grown boy stood his ground with a sling ready in hand, watching them warily.  Veylin raised an empty hand in token of greeting and peace, and after several pony strides, the boy raised his likewise.

That was something.

By the time they reached the track, half a dozen children and a few women had gathered to stare, as if they had never seen Dwarves before.  Perhaps they had not.  But where were their menfolk?  This looked ill; very ill.  Pulling his pony up when they reached the dooryard, Veylin looked around at the mute, fearful faces.  "Greetings, good people," he said as mildly as he could.  "I am Veylin, and this is Thyrnir.  We seek the lady Saelon.  Is she here?"

One young woman bobbed a quick curtsey.  "I will fetch her," she said, and hurried off.

As if she had broken some spell, others came to life.  A boy stepped forward uncertainly.  "Shall I hold your ponies for you?"

"That would be a kindness," Thyrnir said, dismounting and handing the boy his reins.  "Hold Veylin's beast steady by this rock, while I help him down."

It was hard to lean on his nephew in front of all these strangers, harder than dismounting itself.  Yet the murmurs and whispers he could hear were some reassurance.

"Is he the one?"

"Dwarves, silly.  They live in stone—"

"The one Saelon nursed—"

"—Halpan said one slew a fell-beast—"

"Veylin!"  Saelon's voice soared above the others, bright with surprise and delight.  "And Thyrnir.  Welcome!"

Despite her smile, she was careworn, careworn and weary.  "At your service, lady," Veylin replied, bracing against his stick as he drew off his hood and bowed.  Straightening with care, he gazed significantly up and down the crowded terrace.  A few more women and children had come out to join those already gathered.  "How have things been with you, since we parted?"

"Ill," she admitted candidly, her smile crooking, "but you are no less welcome for that.  Come in and let us sit a while.  Urwen," she asked one of the women, "I left Rian tending Gràinne.  Would you see to her, while I attend our guests?"

"Certainly."  This Urwen was nobler to the eye than Saelon, Dúnedain-tall and proud; but only now did she remember that it was rude to stare, dropping her eyes and an uncertain curtsey.  "Welcome, masters."

"At your service," they replied politely.

Veylin stumped with slow dignity to Saelon's cave.  She held the leather drape aside for them, then strode across the cave to scoop up a sheepskin, giving it a brisk shake and spreading it on the bench against the wall.  Her once-neat chamber was as cluttered as the terrace outside, a jumble of heather beds and blankets and clothing.  "Sit, Veylin," she half-invited, half-urged.  "I am glad to see the leg will bear you."

"A little," he allowed, grumbling, "but it is getting stronger."  Setting himself carefully on the bench, he fixed his gaze on her.  "What is all this?  Two more guests will be a burden rather than a pleasure, it appears."

"Pleasure," she echoed, as if trying to remember what it was, and drew her hands down her face as if she could wipe the weariness away.  "Seeing you afoot is the only pleasure I have had for weeks."  She sank down to sit on a rumple of blanket.  "I am glad that you came, but ashamed—my hospitality will be so scant.  All I can offer you for drink is water."

Was she feeding all these folk from her small supply as well as housing them?  "Your water is good, lady, but you need something stronger," Veylin told her, frowning.  "Thyrnir, bring the aleskin from my beast.  Come, Saelon" he urged when the youngster had gone.  "Answer my questions.  What has befallen you?  Who are all these people?"

"The wreck of Srathen Brethil."

He had talked with a Dwarf who had traded there seventy years ago.  A fair and sheltered glen, he had recalled, rich for one so far north, with near two-score steadings like links in a loose chain along the twisting river.  Prosperous enough then for its lord to commission a mailshirt for his heir: Halladan and Saelon's grandsire perhaps, or sire.  Crowded though this place was, there was nothing like two-score families; not a tenth so many people and beasts, and he had not seen a single man grown.  What catastrophe could have driven women and children from their homes and across the mountains?  "The fiends?"

Saelon nodded, mute.

"Where is your brother?"

"Slain."

Veylin shut his eyes against the sight of her heartbreak.  Calling to mind that dark, stern Man, lordly without arrogance, who had loved his sister well enough to let her go her own way, he said, "That is a bitter loss."  Now they had both lost dear ones to these fiends.  Words gave no real comfort, but he presented them as a token.  "He was implacable to his foes, but did not judge hastily."  That he had hoped they might become friends he kept in his heart.

Thyrnir came back in, aleskin in hand.  _Her brother is slain, and their halls broken_ , Veylin signed curtly.  _Fiends_.  "Find Saelon's cup and fill it for her."

"It is in the kist by my bed," she told him, not knowing Thyrnir was stricken rather than puzzled amid the disorder.  "I dare not leave it out these days."

So she did not trust all these folk.  He saw she still wore Rekk's gold in her hair.  "Who leads your people now?"

"I do," she said bleakly.

"Your brother had no son?  No other brothers?"

"My other brothers are long dead.  His son, Halmir, is here, but he is younger than Gaernath."

Were none of the Dúnedain men left alive?  Or even sisters, to share the burden?  Was she, amidst all these people, still alone and friendless?

No.  Not friendless.

Thyrnir brought her silver cup.  "Drink, lady."  It was a dark brew, too bitter for most Men's taste, but she drank deep.

"Tell us the tale," Veylin counseled, as Thyrnir sat down beside him, passing him a cup.  "These fiends have injured us also, and a burden shared is a burden halved.  I have not forgotten that I owe you a great debt."

She told them what she knew, though it was little enough, gleaned from amid the terror and grief of those who had fled: there were at least three of the creatures; the only weapons that would bite their dun hide had been the heirlooms of her house; and that at the end they attacked hall as well as byre, so that it was uncertain whether folk had been carried off or fled into the houseless wild.  She also shared something of her thought for her people's safekeeping.  "With the bounty of the sea," she sighed, "I do not fear we will starve.  But the winter gales are terrible, and where they are all to shelter, I do not know."

"Enlarge the caves," Thyrnir said, a reminder of the obvious.

"We do not have the skill or tools to cut stone.  We build with wood, but as you know we must fare far to fetch it.  Most of the men and horses are at the oakwood now."

"There are more than those outside?" Veylin asked.

"These are the women and children, and the sick are within.  There are forty-two of us, and like to be forty-six by summer, if we lose none."

So many, to be crammed into this narrow place; yet so few.  He calculated how much space they would need, then remembered their height and figured again.  A modest work, if one aimed for use rather than comfort.  "How many able menfolk do you have?"

She had to tell them over on her fingers before answering.  "Sixteen, counting the larger lads."

Sixteen, yet she was so burdened.  Shameful.  Well, if any useful work could be gotten out of them, in this limestone, with so many to shovel and carry . . . .  "Here is a proposition for you, lady."  Veylin leaned back against the wall of the cave.  "We do have the skill and tools, and I am in your debt.  Might I discharge it by taking one burden off your shoulders?"

"Could you?" she exclaimed with naked relief, then recollected herself.  "It would be too much."

He snorted.  "In this soft rock?"  In comparison to where they cut now, this would be a lark, a pleasant change of pace.  "You sell your work cheap.  A life—even a leg—for perhaps five days delving?"

"So little?" she asked, looking from him to Thyrnir and back in disbelief.

Veylin laughed at her ignorance, but kindly.  "I do not mean for the two of us to do it all ourselves."  He clapped his bad leg.  "That would take too long to be of much use against this winter's storms.  No," he explained, "ten or perhaps a dozen of my folk, if yours will help as they can, could see you all snug before the end of the month, provided the stone gives no surprises."

To his dismay, she began to weep, silently, hiding her bare mouth with her hand.  "What have I said?" he asked, alarmed.  If she could speak of her brother's death dry-eyed—

She shook her head and dabbed at her face with her shawl, though the tears continued to fall.  "This is too much kindness," she protested.

If his leg had not been so unwieldy, he would have gone to her.  "So I felt," he told her gently.  One was hardened to the ill fortunes of the world, but what defenses were proof against aid unlooked for?  "May I be of service to you, and have my revenge?"

"Revenge?"  The look she gave him was very strange, compounded of bafflement and consternation.  "Is this what you meant by cruel kindness?"

She remembered that?  Yet she still did not understand him.  "It is your pride that weeps, is it not?  The need is cruel," he chose his words with care, watching her closely to see if she took his meaning, "but it is the succor others give that brings shame."  As he knew all too well after these last months.  She had betrayed her true want with that first cry; he must prevent her from retreating.  "Relief is oft welded to pain . . . while salving one injury we may, without malice, inflict another.  Did you not do so, when you ruined your knife on my shoulder?"

"Cruel to be kind, we say for that," she allowed, "or for my sudden resetting of your leg.  But we do not see kindness itself as an insult."  She paused, brows knitting.  "Or at least we say we do not.  That is not the intent," she concluded, though she looked very thoughtful.

Doubtless there were many here obliged to her generosity.  "Few can match your open-handedness," he told her plainly.  "You may not intend ill, yet one-sidedness breeds resentment.  It is better to trade such sharp favors back and forth."  Did she not know this, or had she forgotten it, living so long alone?  If she would lead her people, she must learn it, and soon.  "Let me do this thing for you," he asked.  "The debt galls, and I would be free."

She stared at the silver cup by her hand.  "Of course."  Taking the cup, she emptied it at one draught, then wiped her face with her shawl.  "Thank you.  The ale and the counsel are welcome, but not as welcome as your work will be.  When might you start?"

Veylin studied her from under lowered brows.  He had expected her pride to put up more of a struggle, but this looked and sounded closer to the cool pragmatism he remembered.  Quickly, he turned his mind to what would be needed, half-fearing she would think better of the concession.  It was the same work they were doing at the new hall; there would be little to do except finish what could not be safely left half-done and pack.  "The day after tomorrow, if we leave you now.  Thyrnir, see if the ponies are still at hand."

"So soon?" she exclaimed, astonishment and disappointment mingled, as Thyrnir slipped out the door.

"We should eat food and take up space you obviously cannot spare, when we are only a few hours from our own hall?  If we are to make it back before dark, the days short as they are, we must not linger."  Hearing Thyrnir's low whistle from without, he finished his ale and set the cup on the bench to take up his stick.

Saelon started to her feet, then faltered as she stretched out a hand to help, awkward, her expression almost forlorn.  Had he misjudged?  Had she given way through weakness rather than strength?  "Come," he chided lightly, taking her hand to pull himself off the bench, "keep up your heart.  Do not worry about feeding or housing us; we can see to our own needs.  Let us get your people housed, then we will turn our thoughts to vengeance on these fiends."

That brought a dim smile to her face.  "Farewell, then.  I will look for you in two days."

He bowed.  "Until then, lady."  Donning his hood, he went out to the ponies with warmer purpose, his hobble forgotten amid his calculations.

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 It was only once everything was in motion that he began to wonder if he had been too hasty.

"Not again," Rekk muttered, as the horsemen rode across the plain towards them.

Thyrnir snorted.  "Be easy.  The odds are reversed: there are only five of them.  And they have left their spears behind."

Vitnir looked from them to the riders.  "You have had trouble with these Men?"

"A misunderstanding," Thyrnir clarified, fixing a droll eye on Rekk, "over some rough handling of the Lady Saelon."

"Which was satisfactorily settled between us before the eve was out," Rekk declared testily, as Vitnir and his brother Vitr looked at him likewise.  "If she has no complaint, they should have none.  Her brother let it lie."

"He is dead, and we do not know how fair-minded these Men may be," Thyrnir reminded him.

"Gaernath is among them," Veylin noted.  It was hard to miss that flaming copper hair.  Was the boy there from liking, or was he—save them!—now one of the chief Men of these folk?  The lack of spears and mail was reassuring; nevertheless, he felt he had strayed onto broken ground.

Agreements of this magnitude were customarily made between men, among Men as well as Dwarves; yet Saelon led the remnants of her people.  Of her wisdom and will, Veylin had little doubt; yet he remembered her acknowledgement, as they sat at board with Halladan, that some of her folk did.  Were they here among the refugees, or had those chosen to flee in other directions?  Perhaps it would have been wiser to delay a day or two, so she could have laid his offer before such Men as there were.  Veylin could not imagine such a case ever befalling Dwarves, but even beardlings must resent their women turning to men of alien race for aid.  The situation was so peculiar, so cross-cut as by faults: Dwarves and Men; men and women; the repayment of a debt to one that would openly benefit many.

They were here now; if need be, they could turn around and go back again.  But if so, these folk were fools.

The horsemen pulled up some way ahead and waited for the Dwarves to come to them, which was courteous, especially in comparison to their last meeting on this plain.  "Welcome, Veylin," their leader greeted him, "and the same to your companions."

It was the young Dúnadan who had chosen to stay behind with Saelon and Gaernath when the others had ridden home.  "Well met—Halpan, is it?"  As the Man smiled, pleased to be remembered, Veylin added, "At your service."

"So we hear, and we would be at yours.  You were friendly with our former lord, Halladan: this is his son, Halmir."

Drawing off his hood, Veylin bowed to the boy.  "Greetings, Halmir.  I was grieved to hear of your father's death.  I, too, have lost kin to these creatures."

"So my aunt has told me, Master Veylin."  A child's soft face and schooled courtesy, but already so tall.

"Gaernath you know well," Halpan went on, passing over the fair-haired man who sat his horse by Halmir, but Veylin remembered him at Halladan's side likewise.  "This is his elder brother, Mais."

Not so ruddy-haired as Gaernath; he could be few years older.  "Greetings," Veylin said politely.

"Master," with a bow of his head.  "My brother speaks well of you."  Behind him, Gaernath colored.

"And I have only good to say of him," Veylin assured him.  "Here are my companions.  Rekk and Thyrnir some of you have met before—"

"Oh, we are hardly likely to forget Master Rekk," Halpan murmured with a dry smile.

"—but these will be new to you all: Vitr and Vitnir; Nordri and his sons Nyr and Nyrað; Thiolf; and Ingi."

"Welcome to Echad Gaearon, masters," Halpan said.  "Come up to the caves.  Lady Saelon is waiting to receive you."

They made quite a show, going up the track, and from the rough count Veylin managed on the way up, it looked as if everyone had turned out for the spectacle.  The expressions on their faces were mixed: some hopeful; some fearful as two days ago; many sharp-eyed, withholding judgment.

So many children.  How did Men multiply so, amid such evil chances?

Saelon stood in the dooryard before her chamber.  It was the first time he had seen her in something other than plain linen and undyed wool, and her dark hair had been put up with care.  She looked the noble lady . . . but that garnet hue, for all it went well with Rekk's gold, warred with her sea-colored eyes.  "Welcome, Master Veylin," she said, formally gracious, "and all your companions likewise."

"At your service, Lady Saelon."  He drew off his hood and bowed as low as his wretched leg would allow.

She curtseyed in return.  "At yours and your family's.  May I present my kinswomen to you?  My brother's daughter, Rian; Urwen, Haldorn's widow; and Halpan's sister Bereth."

"Ladies."  Bother all this bowing—but it would set her less apart.  It could not be taken well if she was the only woman to mingle with Dwarves.  Who Haldorn had been, he did not know, but he recalled Urwen from his earlier visit.  Rian was the young woman who had gone to fetch Saelon.  The curtseys of all three were stiffly correct, their grace marred by unease.

"Please sit," Saelon asked, gesturing towards the benches set along the base of the cliff, "and take some refreshment after your journey."

Veylin planted both hands on the head of his stick and looked up at her from under bristling brows.  He had told her they would supply their own wants.  If she could not offer a cup of ale to two, how could she afford hospitality for half a score?

"We all thank you for the offer of your skill," she added, laying subtle emphasis on the first two words.  "Timely is the hand of a friend."

Was this for her people's sake then, a sop to their crushed pride?  "It profits no one to ignore a neighbor's need," he replied, vowing to take it up with her later, when he would not offend tender-spirited Men with his bluntness.  "A little something will be welcome, but we are keen to get to work.  The weather is chancy this late in the year, and the sooner we have roof enough for all our heads, the better."

"Hear him!" cried a greybeard.  "Uncanny they may be, but that's plain sense."

Saelon hid a smile behind her hand as two barely bearded boys belatedly hushed the old Man, and took a seat on bench nearest her door.  "Rian, Bereth—the ale, please."

While the younger women served, Saelon invited him and Thyrnir to sit with her and Halmir; Urwen took her own bench with Halpan, who invited Rekk to join them.  Saelon had him introduce each of the other Dwarves, courteously greeting each and looking on them carefully, not just at the color of their beards and hoods.

She also named two others of her household for them.  The tall, fair-haired Man who kept close to the young heir was Tarain; the other, as watchful of her, was a short older Man, with a respectable if grizzled brown beard that made up somewhat for his near-baldness.  Partalan, Saelon called him, and he looked on the Dwarves with the unfriendly eyes of a Dunland cattle dog.  An old war-axe, if Veylin had ever seen one; he hoped he would not be trouble.

Looking around at those beyond their party, Veylin could see that there were menfolk among them, but of what Men pleased to call the lower sort: those who were not Dúnedain, like Gaernath and his brother, and that broad, black-bearded fellow who still managed to look prosperous; and their servants.  How such Men tolerated their lot—especially such as that Partalan—was beyond him.  Dwarves, being the sons of seven Fathers, would defer to an elder, or their superior in craft, but deference was not the surrender of one's life to another's purposes for a morsel of food and a piece of cloth to keep off the weather.

They did not sit long.  There might be two hours of good daylight left, and Nordri soon took his prentice Ingi and Rekk off to survey the cliff face and the known caves.  Thyrnir oversaw the pitching of their booths in the narrow angle at the southern end of the cliff-shelf, the only space not already occupied.  They would be cramped there, but only for a night or two, until they had delved enough to make better shelter.  Kept from useful work by his leg, Veylin sat on the bench and talked with Halpan, who brought in the other freemen to share what was left of the ale once the women had withdrawn.

It soon became clear why Saelon bore the burden of leadership.  Of the three freemen grown, Halpan and Mais were too young for wisdom; they wished to speak of nothing but fiends, and vengeance against them.  The black-bearded Man, Maelchon, went to the other extreme; he thought of nothing but the safety of his large family, and what crops might be gotten from the plain below.  Meritorious, both—and the youngsters would want weapons, while Maelchon might grow more than his family could eat—but in times such as these, a people needed someone with both eyes open.

After supper, Veylin gathered Rekk, Nordri, and Thyrnir, and went along to Saelon's chamber.  They found her alone, but for Rian, who was clearing the board, and Partalan, who sat in the far corner, mending a knife sheath.  "Good evening, masters," she said, getting up to offer them the nearer bench.  "What brings you here?"

"We would seek your counsel on how to proceed," Nordri explained, taking the seat.  "You have good stone here, that will be a delight to work.  But we do not know what Men might want from a hall.  It has been long since our forefathers built for the kings of old, and even that was above ground, not Dwarf-fashion."

"What do you need to know?"  Saelon sat down again across from him, while Rekk sat down on his right hand, and Thyrnir helped Veylin settle on his left.

"The number and size of chambers, mainly.  If there is a particular way you would like them connected, we will do what we can, although the stone may dictate otherwise."

"Will you use the caves already here?"

Nordri was pleased by such a sensible question.  At supper Veylin had heard that there had already been words over the necessity of moving a loom to examine the roof of what had been the byre-cave.  "It would be best to place the entrance in the one Thyrnir opened on his earlier visit, and cut back from there.  The roof of the largest may become unstable if we remove much nearby, at least if we delve in haste.  If we disturb this one, Rekk fears we will cut off the spring that fills the basin at your door."

"I would be sorry for that," she told them.  "It is very convenient, but I value it for its music as much as for the water."

"Never fear," Rekk assured her.  "We will preserve it for you."

She glanced at him, surprised by his earnestness.  "Thank you."  Looking back to Nordri, she asked, "How do Dwarves order their halls?" and, when he remained silent, lips pursed thoughtfully, stroking his amber-dark beard, she looked to Veylin, "Or is that an indiscreet question?"

"I suppose not," Nordri decided, glancing back to the corner where Partalan sat silently stitching.  Rian had taken the dishes out to wash them.  "Not in general.  Beyond the entranceway, there is usually a great hall, for council and feasting.  Other halls and workshops as well, but we will not be making anything so grand here.  Then the chambers of different families, and storerooms."

"If we can shift Halpan's family out of the old byre-cave, that can serve as storeroom again," Saelon decided.  "A common hall is a good thought, and a chamber for each of the large families."

Nordri pulled out his slate and began scratching a rough plan.  "How many families?"

"Four.  If it can be contrived for each to have its own hearth," she declared, "that would be a blessing."

"Why?" Thyrnir asked.  "It is more temperate underground than above.  So long as the entrance is well-designed, to keep out drafts, a hearth in the hall will provide ample warmth."

"I do not know how it may be with your women, but among Men, a woman's hearth is her lordship.  We do not share them peacefully."

Nordri looked up from his sketch.  "Indeed?  Well, we will see what we can do, but I make no promises.  Bringing fresh air to the further chambers will be a challenge as it is.  Separate hearths would probably require chimneys, and there is a great thickness of stone over our heads.  And I cannot promise a garderobe, unless Rekk finds another spring in that part of the cliff."

"A what?"

"A privy," Rekk told her.

"Inside?"

Scowling, Veylin kicked Thyrnir with his good leg, so the youngster turned his laugh into a series of coughs.  "Only if there is enough water to wash it clean," Nordri explained.  "It is less noisome than the alternatives."

The place was already more noisome than it had been.  Veylin did not like to think what it would be like in summer, if alternatives were not found.  "We are aiming for use, Lady," he cautioned her, "not for much comfort."

"A roof and four bare walls will be far more comfort than we have now," she assured him, "so long as we do not have to lie stacked on top of one another.  We will be glad of whatever you can do.  Or at least most of us will."  She favored them with her wry smile.  "I will not pretend that no one will mutter."

"We are used to that," Rekk maintained, with a shrug.  "Let me ask: is your heart still hot against me, Lady?"

"No," she said, puzzled.  "What makes you think so?"

"The gold is still in your hair."

"Ah."  She reached up and touched it, where it had been twined into her crown of plaits.  "Truth be told, master, it is one of the finest things I have.  I rarely dress as befits my station, but I did not want my people to feel like beggars today."

Veylin frowned: admiring a water-cut basin, flattering his simple gold chain so . . . if she kept this up, Rekk might thaw towards her.  "Is that why you brewed ale for our welcome, when I said you need not spend your scant stores on us?"

"Of course.  If you insist on bearing the whole burden," she told him, "I will give you an accounting tomorrow, and you can replace it, measure for measure.  Will that satisfy you?"

He saw that Nordri had looked up from his sketch, veiled amusement in his eye.  "I suppose it will have to," he rumbled.

The stonemason snorted, and pushed his slate towards Saelon.  "Do not let him daunt you, Lady.  It is his leg that makes him cross in the evenings.  Here—will this serve your needs?"

They all bent their heads over the rough plan, but Veylin sat back, rubbing his knee and resenting the formalities that had made it ache so.  Daunt her?  Rekk could bruise her flesh and tear her hair, and for a trifle of gold, he was favored with pleasing words; he offered her a haven for her people and she burst into tears, then treated him with coolly punctilious courtesy.  She was as contrary as his sister.  Was it any wonder her own brother had found life less of a burden when she was twenty leagues off?

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They started work the next morning in the cold raw dawn twilight, the breath of Dwarf and Man alike steaming like dragon breath in the glow of the lamps as they cleared the stores from the smallest cave.  Once they were into the rockface, the scant hours of daylight at the fag end of the year would be no impediment: all would be lamplit, day or night.  There were other tasks, however, that needed the brightness and security of the sun.  As Nordri and his sons began to tunnel into the cliff, feeling their way through the rock with their pick-points, and Thiolf and Ingi began showing the Men how to clear the spoil without getting in the way, Thyrnir was assembling a party to go to the oakwood for timber props and frames, and Saelon gathered women to cut withies along the river for more packbaskets.

With so many things that needed doing, everyone could find something that they were willing to do, and if they wished to avoid the Dwarves, they could do so without shirking.  All in all, Veylin reflected as he accompanied the delving crew back to their camp, a very fair day's work, considering that so many were unfamiliar with it.  Some supper, a chance to beat the chalky rock dust from their clothes, and a little sleep, and they could start opening up the hall tomorrow.

"Masters?"  A Man Veylin had not seen before stepped forward into the lamplight, a strangely shaped burden on his shoulder.  A sharper glance showed several other folk hanging further back, outside the clearest light; did they think Dwarves would not see them in the dimness?

"Yes?" Veylin replied, as Nyr raised the lamp higher, to show his face plain.  "I do not think I know you."

"No, Master.  I am Aniel, the huntsman.  I was out on the chase when you came, and between your work and mine, our paths have not crossed.  But I have a present for you all."  He held out his burden, and Vitnir stepped forward to take it.

"A haunch of venison," he announced with relish.

"Is this from Lady Saelon?" Veylin demanded, displeased.  First the ale, now this; she would keep giving, no matter what he said.  "I have told her that we do not want such gifts, what you can ill spare, straitened as you are.  I am the one repaying the debt, not her."

Vitnir gazed on the haunch regretfully; Rekk had a surly look; and even Nordri looked at him reproachfully.  The little knot of Men had gone very still and silent, though one on the edge of the group started to slip away into the darkness.

The huntsman looked down on him, brows drawn together, but not quite in a frown.  "No, Master, this is not from Saelon, and I do not know what you may have agreed between you, so please do not take offense.  This is from us common folk.

"We know you are doing this in return for her nursing of you after you were mauled by a fell-beast, to relieve her and not us.  But we are the ones who will benefit most, and we would like to show we are grateful.  We can repay her all our lives, however long they may be, but if we do not thank you now, when will the chance come again?  Please, masters, do not be too proud to accept it.  It is little enough.  Corn we are hard short of, it is true, but there is no lack of game."

Truly, one would have to have a heart of stone to deny such a plea.  So Gaernath had offered him the plumpest of the grouse he had first taken with Vestri's bow.  So poor, these folk, and these the poorest among them . . . and so open-handed it shamed him.  "We will accept your gift, Aniel—and you others, there," Veylin relented, bowing.  "Indeed, if I refuse it, my own folk might rise up and slay me in the night, for denying them such a treat.  Meat is welcome after much labor, and venison is sweeter than salt beef."

There in the dimness, someone dared to laugh; one of the greybeard's boys, Veylin thought.  "Sweet it is to hear music again," a girl's voice called, high and clear, "strange though yours is, for we have not had the heart to make any."

Vitnir, who would pick up his pipes as gladly as his hammer, bowed as best he could for the haunch.  "If you would have more, encourage your huntsman!  After a long day's work and a good supper, how can we not play and sing?"

"Give us a few more days," Nordri told them, "and you will have a hall to hear song in.  Perhaps your hearts will lift then.  It is hard to be houseless."  When the Men had withdrawn and the younger Dwarves hastened ahead with the venison, Nordri kept Veylin's slower pace, glancing at him sidelong.  "Your choice of site for your hall seems less strange to me now.  As Men go, these are good."

If Nordri thought he had chosen the site for the neighbors, Veylin would not correct him.  "We shall certainly not go hungry, unless they starve themselves," he said dryly.

Nordri laughed.  "So it is with Men, feast or famine; they drown you in ale or grudge you a morsel of bread.  Take while they are in the mood to give, for it will not last."

Easy for him to say; he was not the one enmeshed in this widening net of gifts and gratitude.  Veylin wished he was certain this was no more than a passing mood.

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Notes

**Echad Gaearon** : Sindarin, "camp (of) great sea."

**Booth** : a temporary shelter or tent; from Old Norse _b?th_ , see Scots _buith_ , _bothy_.

**Slate** : a flat tablet of fine-grained slate that can be drawn or written on with a slate pencil (or chalk), and erased by rubbing; the predecessor of chalkboards.


	11. Yuletide

_The brotherhood is not by the blood certainly:_  
_But neither are men brothers by speech-by saying so:  
_ _Men are brothers by life lived and are hurt for it:_

_Hunger and hurt are great begetters of brotherhood:_  
_Humiliation has gotten much love:  
_ _Danger I say is the nobler father and mother:_

_Those are as brothers whose bodies have shared fear_  
_Or shared harm or shared hurt or indignity.  
_ _Why are the old soldiers brothers and nearest?_

\--Archibald MacLeish, "Speech to Those Who Say Comrade"

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"Where is the Lady Saelon?" Veylin asked a woman who was spreading washing over thornbushes to dry.

She shrugged and turned away.

With a sour look, Veylin leaned heavily on his stick and rubbed his aching leg.  If it had been sound, he could have sought Saelon out himself and avoided such snubs.  Was this Tearlag?  Or Gaernath's father's widow?  It was hard to keep the ones who shunned them straight.  He was wondering whether he should take a seat on one of the benches and wait for Saelon to pass—she seemed never to be at rest by day, always moving from one thing to the next—when there was a tug at his sleeve.

It was one of the small children, a boy by its clothes.  "I know," he declared.

"Do you?"  Veylin found the children of Men curiously pleasing.  Dwarves kept their little ones close, treasures to be carefully guarded, but among Men those too tender for useful work ran almost wild, flitting about like finches.  They seemed fascinated by the Dwarves, yet whispered or giggled at a distance.  Few were as bold as this one, who came barely to his shoulder.  "Will you tell me?"

The boy put his head to one side to consider, pert as a wren.  "Why do you want to know?"

Fearless but not thoughtless.  Veylin smiled.  "What is your name?"

"Hanadan."

Ah; one of the Dúnedain.  "You are right to ask, Hanadan, since the Lady is your kinswoman.  As you may know, I owe her a great debt, for she saved my life."  Lowering his voice and leaning nearer, he asked, "Can you keep a secret?"

"Yes."  The child was indignant that there should be doubt.

Veylin showed him what he held in his hand.  For a moment, Hanadan looked without understanding, puzzled; then he saw, and his eyes grew round with wonder.  Veylin held a finger to his lips as a reminder, and the boy stifled his exclamation of delight.  "I would know where she is, so I can give it to her."

Hanadan laughed.  "She is down on the shore."

How apt.  Veylin chuckled as well, but his amusement died when he looked that way: as ever, the sea was daunting . . . and it was a long way, too far for his lameness.  He would have to wait until she returned.  Heaving a disappointed sigh, he patted the boy's shoulder.  "Thank you, Hanadan."

"You will go?"  It was a question; the child knew something was amiss.

"My leg will not bear me so far.  No matter," he brushed it off.  "I will give it to her when she returns."  And he stumped back to the delving, where the hall had taken shape and they were opening the chambers off its sides.

Not long after, as he directed Tarain, Finean, and Artan in the setting of the hearth kerb, he heard one of the Men—Bred, was it?—shout, "Ho, boy!  Clear out of here.  This is no place for playing."

"I am looking for Master Veylin," Hanadan's high voice protested.

"What for?" scoffed Bred.  "Away with you, before I tell your mother."

"Here, Hanadan," Veylin called.  As the boy ran over, he frowned at him.  "He is right; you should not be at the workings.  What do you want?"

Hanadan seized his hand and tugged him towards the entrance.  "Come," he urged, his smile irrepressible.

"Why?"

"Come," is all he would say, an impish gleam in his eye.

With lowering brows that threatened consequences if this should be no more than a lark, Veylin went with him.  Outside a boy a little larger stood holding Veylin's saddled pony with a dubious expression.  "Hanadan said you wanted your pony?" he said.

"He needs to go down to the shore," Hanadan explained, with sorely tried patience.  "I told you."

The taller boy, who might have been his brother from the sameness of their features, asked, "Is he being a pest, Master?"

"A pest?"  Veylin shook his head and smiled.  "No.  It was a kind thought.  Will you help me mount?"

Once the elder, Dwarf-high and a good support for all that he was slender as a sapling, helped him into the saddle, Veylin took the reins from Hanadan.  "Thank you.  Do not make a habit of such liberties, however," he warned.  The boy's smile did not give him much hope of it, however.

As his pony ambled down the track and over the plain, Veylin reflected on the differences in temper among Men: some so bold and open-handed; others untrusting and rude, even though they would be houseless but for dwarven assistance.  Men and women, adults and children alike; not even all the Dúnedain were friendly, although they masked their dislike with greater care, perhaps from pride in their gentility.  Was it wise to found any hopes on such uneven ground?  Could it be more stable than these sandhills his beast was laboring through?

He halted the pony as it reached the crest, and looked the sea in the face.  Though the sky was mostly blue, the surf did not lap as mildly as it had on that autumn day when he had followed the opal dyke onto the foreshore, and the tide was not so far out.  But having come so far, how could he return, his errand unaccomplished?  Even that child had known that his gift would be most fitly given here.

What must this place have been like on that stormy day when Saelon had brought them the second log, giddy, as drunk on the dreadful power of the waves as some grew in battle?  And where was she, anyway?

Veylin had concluded that the child was having a joke on him and was raking the sandy arc with one last scowling glance when he finally spied her, where it was hardly possible for anyone to be.  Huddled in her cloak, in a nook of the one battered outcrop of rock that still stood proud of the beach, she was gazing out across the water and dabbling her feet in the cold foam.

Madness.

What had her brother said?  When a woman's heart is given . . . .  Even from here he could see that she sat at ease, as a woman might rest in the arm of a mighty warrior, without fear.  Halladan must have seen this; and though he had not loved the sea, he must have trusted it with her, to leave her here.

Bearing what he did, he dared approach, taking his pony down the steep, sliding slope and onto the shore, but only to where the very edges of the waves fingered the grains of sand, shifting them this way and that.  "Saelon!" he called across the surging water.

She looked around, startled, and scrambled to her feet.  "Is something wrong?" she called back, suddenly fearful.

"No!"  He cursed himself; of course she must think only great necessity would bring a Dwarf to the sea.  "All is well.  But I have found something that may please you."

Cocking her head curiously, she picked her way along the dark rib of rock, until it disappeared under the pale sands.  She waded up out of the rim of surf, stopping alongside his pony.  "What is it?"

Veylin drew the rough chunk of limestone from his pouch and handed it to her.  When he was mounted, they were much the same height; she looked at him quizzically from under a crooked eyebrow and turned it over.  She recognized the silver-grey shape within the creamy stone much faster than the boy had done.  "A shell!"

"So it seems."

She ran a finger over one of its many horns, then met his gaze.  "From the cliff?"

"A good thirty paces in from the face, and truly set in the stone, as you can see."

"How can that be?"

"How do you think?  When the stone of the cliff was made, all this was under the sea."

Saelon looked away to the cliff-top, then down at the ripples that nearly reached her feet.  "Did it reach so high and lay so long?"

"At the breaking of Númenor, or Beleriand?"  Veylin shook his head; he did not smile at her ignorance so close to the waves.  "No.  We are told that there were greater tumults of land and sea in the days before the Children woke.  Such things are sometimes found while quarrying, I have heard, although I have never seen one before.  There is little limestone in the Ered Luin."

"It is a marvel," she breathed, stroking the ancient thing.  "Like a fantastical whelk."  It was with some reluctance that she held it back out to him.

He closed his hands on the saddlebow.  "If it pleases you, keep it."

Her sea-colored eyes flashed; she had not forgotten.  "It is rare, and a pleasure to behold.  You do not value it?"

"No more than other things."  Veylin paused, then asked, "Can this be chance?  Or is it a token?"

"Of what?"

To him it was a sign that the waves did not always conquer the land, or at least not forever; that there was give and take between Mahal and the Lord of Waters.  How she, a lover of the sea, might read it, he did not know.  "Amity between sea and stone."

Saelon smiled soberly.  "I have never thought they had cause to quarrel."

No; she had not quarreled with them, even when she had cause.  And she had had cause.  Her folk whispered that the sea spoke to her.  If this was a sign, perhaps it was for him, for the Dwarves . . . why else would it be set in stone?  "Dwarves are slow to trust," he told her, feeling some explanation was necessary.

"So I have heard."

Stone was hard, to endure, but water had the patience to wear it away, drop by drop, grain by grain.  "And I have heard that the Dúnedain are long-sighted."  Then it came to him.  "You would sow.  For what harvest?"

She gazed out to sea.  "I do not know."  He must have made some sound of dissatisfaction, for she turned her sharp falcon's glance on him.  "I do not expect you to trust me.  How can you, when my own folk do not?"

Veylin shrugged.  "Some of them do not.  Some of them are fools."

"Would that I was sure they were one and the same," she replied, as if in jest.

She had not pressed him; it would be unkind not to return the favor, especially given the many other things that weighed on her.  "Doubtless time will tell."  One wave reached higher than the others, splashing around her calves and his pony's fetlocks.  The beast stood it stolidly, but possible signs from Mahal notwithstanding, it was too close for Veylin's comfort.  "Should we not return to the cliff?  After so much time, we will be missed."

She laughed at him.  Taking the bridle, she began leading the pony towards a break in the dunes.  "Is it the tide you fear, or the wagging tongues of gossips?"

"The wagging—"  For a moment, Veylin did not understand; then he understood all too well.  "Some of your folk _are_ fools," he growled, disgusted.  "Worse than fools.  Their tongues had best not wag where I might hear them, if they wish to keep them."

"It was a jest," Saelon hastened to tell him, looking alarmed.

"It is not a matter for jest."  He studied her narrowly as she and the pony toiled up the loose sand to the firm turf beyond.  No; free she had been, but never in that way, not even while nursing him.  Had he not just seen how close she clove to the sea?  Yet from her silence, she was uneasy.  It must be more than mere jest.  "You allow them to speak of you so?"

"Allow?"  There was a kind of relief in her snap, like the cracking of an overburdened pillar.  "As soon hold back the tide."  She glanced back at him, her face angry, and also troubled.  "They have spoken nonsense of me for so long I no longer regard it."

Veylin took the reins again, halting the pony.  "They are no longer twenty leagues off, Saelon."  It was easy to disregard what one did not hear.

She let go of the bridle and faced him.  "No.  They have been forced to take refuge with the madwoman by the sea.  And now she lays them under obligation to uncanny folk.  If some find that easier to choke down with a splash of spite," she said almost savagely, "they are welcome to the sauce.  Folk will judge for themselves what is bile and what is truth.  I do not know how it is among Dwarves," she declared, "but among Men, protest feeds suspicion."

"The words of Men often seem crooked."  After some days among them, it did not surprise him to hear that her own folk found her as strange as they did.  Yet that they should invent absurdities when she did not trouble to hide her eccentricities . . . .

"The cruelty of the world twists us."  There was bleak resignation in her voice.

Whereas Mahal had made them to resist.  Should they then pity and despise Men?  They did not despise copper for not being steel.  "That has not kept you from speaking truly."

"That is why I left them."  She gazed west again.  "When the way is bent, the straight path seems queer."

In Mithlond Veylin had seen Elves with the sea-longing, but their look was different from Saelon's.  "Would you sail?"

Her laugh was nearer a snort.  "Do not fear," she assured him.  "Even if I would not be unwelcome, I am hard aground on this rock.  And unlike you, nothing I can do will free me."

"Then hold fast until fortune turns again," he urged her.  "It is as fickle as these waves, now high, now low."

"If only it were as sure to rise after its ebb!  Be easy," she sighed.  "I am not in despair so much as plagued, which is why I took refuge on the shore.  My bitter words are for the relief of my heart."  She looked again at the shell set in stone.  "I should thank you for enduring them."

"So brief a storm is a matter for endurance?" Veylin scoffed lightly.  "Did I not tell you that a burden shared was a burden halved?"

"True."  She turned a bittersweet smile on him.  "Would that I had someone here so steady under the load, who gave such good counsel.  I will miss you when you have gone."

He snorted and kicked the pony back into motion.  "If you have the wit and will to keep peace with four foul-tempered Dwarves, you can tame this lot."

"Do not mistake them," she warned, a fierce gleam of nettled pride in her eye as she fell in beside him.  "They have been humbled, but they will not be quiet long."

"No.  They will not."  That could be counted on, but whether for good or ill was less certain.

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They finished on Yule Eve, Vitr forging the pintles for the stout oaken main door as Men hung the lighter panels closing off the side chambers.  Vitnir was setting the bolts for the cauldron chains over the hearth, standing on Halpan's shoulders since the youths had been overhasty in reducing the scaffolding to faggots for the holiday fire.  Children—many of whom were supposed to be helping their mothers carry their slender goods into their new homes—chased each other round and round, in and out of the chambers, barely dodging cursing workmen and agilely evading half-hearted attempts to capture them, piping Yule carols like birds in spring.

Veylin sat back on the bench, pipe in hand, and smiled at the merry disorder.  It had taken more than five days, although Nordri's pride in his work was largely to blame: he would not leave such fine stone rough-finished, and Veylin had seen Nyrað carving a simple frieze around the upper part of the hall.  There also seemed to be panels of low-relief birches on either side of the main doorway.  Such touches aside, by dwarven standards it was a very humble hall, yet most of the Men thought it grand as a palace and even the grumblers had temporarily shut their mouths.  The admiration, and the sight of folk who had been in despair so short a time before in better heart, was compensation enough for a few more days of labor.

After they had gotten Vitnir safely down from his awkward perch, Halpan came over and sat down beside Veylin, rubbing his shoulder with a grin.  "You are heavier than you look, you Dwarves," he complained cheerfully.  "Although seeing how tirelessly you work, I should not be surprised.  You will stop to keep Yule with us, I hope."

Veylin had wearied of even glowering at their persistent generosity.  After a few thoughtful puffs on his pipe, he allowed, "Let me speak to the others and learn their minds.  For my part, most of my near kin are with me, so it matters little where Yule finds us."  He knew what the answer would be.  The weather was turning foul, with a misting rain and deepening cold, the nearest they had yet come to frost.  Though it was milder than it would be in the hills inland, let alone the mountains, no one would choose to leave a good fire for ice.  From the amount of wood that had been scoured off the nearby shores and stacked under the overhang of the cliff, they meant to have a roaring blaze in the new hearth.

A pity they would not be able to dedicate the hall with a proper thanksgiving feast.  Rekk was concerned about the lack of ale, fearing bad luck if they did not pour the customary draught for the first fire, but Nordri had reminded him that the hall was for Men, who would doubtless see to whatever rites they felt necessary.

Veylin was wondering what, if any, rites Men might use to dedicate a new dwelling when there was a bustle in the entryway.  At first he thought it was Thyrnir and Vitr getting the heavy oak door up, but there was a shout of joy from Maelchon and a press of wet-cloaked Men pushing through, straining to hold some great weight off the ground.

Halpan jumped to his feet and began striding towards them, sweeping aside the children who were crowding around, some of them hopping with excitement.  "What have you got there?" he called, over the growing hubbub.

"Boar!" Gaernath cried triumphantly, letting go of a hind leg.  Halmir, who had held it with him, stumbled and sagged, but without losing his grin; and then everyone else let go and the dark beast sprawled onto the floor.

"He must be near thirty stone," Maelchon breathed in awe, clapping a congratulatory arm around Aniel's sleet-peppered shoulders.

"This is the monster of the oakwood, Aniel?" Halpan asked.

"Aye.  Partalan—" the huntsman grinned over heads at the grizzled warrior "—said he couldn't bear the thought of fish stew for Yule.  You should have seen his thrust."

"So," Fransag, Maelchon's wife, asked, setting her hands on her hips as she looked down on the carcass, "how will you all be wanting to eat him?  Seethed or roasted?  Not that there isn't plenty for both.  And the head, of course.  Mercy . . . who'd have imagined we'd be having boar's head for Yule?"

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The boar's head was the centerpiece of the Yule feast, and if there was a shortage of pies and the usual cakes, there were stewed sloes and crabs, and cakes of hazelnuts and honey; oyster chowder and smoked salmon and goose to relieve a palate surfeited on pork; buttered kail and boiled onions and a seaweed Saelon insisted was excellent but hardly anyone else ate.

Most welcome of all was the thin sweet mead that Urwen brought out only after they were seated at the board, brewed in secret using her own malt and honey contributed by Saelon.  There was barely enough for everyone to have a scant cup, and Rekk nearly started a fight by tossing half of his into the blazing hearth; but once they had explained, Muirne, Artan's sweetheart, ran to fetch the rowan wand she had cut to put over the door.  All of the Dúnedain except Saelon laughed at her charm, and there was lively talk through the meal about ways to court good fortune and turn bad, a subject on which everyone had much to say.

Music, however, did not come easily.  Perhaps it was because the drink had run out; perhaps because the Men had brought few instruments with them when they fled . . . and not all of them found dwarven playing to their liking.  It might simply have been that, though relieved, their hearts were still too heavy for much song.  Some had already withdrawn, carrying limp children off to new beds, when Partalan came back into the hall, a cased harp in his hands.

Veylin had been listening attentively while Maelchon and Mais lamented the loss of their farming equipage—ploughs and scythes, spades and sledges—and wondered how they might strip the turf and break the soil on enough land for next year's crop.  He had noted the warrior's entrance, no more . . . until the Man began to play.

At first it was light melodies, mainly the carols Veylin recognized from the children's singing, the Man gruffly disparaging the tuning of his harp and fingers between pieces; but this was no pot-house playing.  He did hazard a rousing drinking song, but midway through, Tarain broke in.  "That needs ale, and plenty of it, to sound well.  Stop toying with us, brother.  Play Evendim."

"My fingers are too unpracticed for that," Partalan objected, his gaze going to the high table, where Saelon sat between Halmir and Rian.

"Nonsense," Maelchon declared.  "And even if it were true, you must.  It would not be Yule without Evendim."

Veylin saw that everyone was looking at the high table.  Saelon wore that look of cool placidity that was her war-mask; Halmir was biting his lip; and Rian was considering her aunt sidelong, her expression torn.  "What would you like?" Halpan asked them, gently.

"It is for Halmir and Rian to say," Saelon replied.

"He always asked you for Evendim," Halmir said to Partalan, and Veylin realized they must be speaking of Halladan.

"He did," Partalan agreed.  "Do you ask me for it now?"

It was one of those passing moments that suddenly takes on stark significance: the father's sworn man asking the son if he wished his service.  The boy looked around at all the attentive faces, brow knit, expression grave, weighing them.  "Yes, please.  We would like to hear it."

"If we cannot have Father with us," Rian seconded, her hand resting on Saelon's arm in comfort or restraint, "we would at least have the memory of him, in happy times."

Partalan bowed his head and set his fingers to the strings.  If they were unpracticed, Veylin would have liked to hear him when he was in form, for he had heard few better, save among the Elves.  There were hidden depths to this blunt-faced, uncongenial Man, who played the achingly beautiful air with such feeling that Veylin saw tears in Maelchon's eyes beside him.

Saelon's hand was before her face before many bars had sounded, and soon after she withdrew, slipping from the hall as unobtrusively as possible.

When Partalan finished, he stood and bowed to Halmir and Rian.  Urwen asked for another tune, but he shook his head and she did not press him.  The poignant performance seemed to have brought the festivities to a close, like a dying fall of notes that call for silence after.  Most people withdrew, and Partalan rejoined Tarain and the other men at arms, who appeared to have a skin of something they meant to console him with.  Rian cast her glance around the hall and spoke briefly with Urwen, then shepherded her brother to their chamber.

Saelon had not returned.  Frowning, Veylin rose and made his way to the door, waving off Thyrnir's inquiring glance.  The half-frozen rain had stopped, but the wind was keen and cold, tearing rents in the cloud that let through a glimmer of starlight and the occasional wash of silver from the rising moon.  He hoped she had not gone down to the shore to drown her grief, figuratively, in the frigid waves, and was reassured when one of the fleeting gleams of moonlight showed a dark figure on the flat rock near the edge of the shelf, gazing down across the plain.

Stepping out to let one of the Men pass, Veylin weighed whether to leave her to her grief or go to her.  He did wish to speak with her, privately if possible, before they left; and if the weather cleared, they would be on their way as soon as they could strap their gear on the ponies.  They had their own hall to finish, before winter deepened further.  With the cold keeping most folk close-gathered in the hall, it would be hard to avoid other ears if he waited.

With a muttered curse for the cold, he went to her.  "Mad as you are," he rumbled, "you cannot be out here for pleasure."  He glanced westward, but while the wind was blowing the upper sky clear, fog clung to the shore.  "And the sea cannot be seen in this mirk."

"No," she admitted.  "Though it can be heard."

A heavier swath of cloud made it too dim to see her face clearly, but she sounded as if she had been weeping.  He sat down beside her on the stone.  "Why do you leave the warmth within to seek the counsel of the sea?"

She turned her head sharply in his direction, but if he could see little he was sure she saw less, and after a few breaths she shook her head dismissively.  "No great cause.  Partalan played Halladan's favorite tune," her voice clotted with grief, "and I could not bear it."  She lifted a hand, as if to dash away tears.

"He must have been dear indeed," Veylin said quietly, "for the pain to be so sharp after so many years apart."

"Except at Yule.  Halladan insisted I keep Yule in Srathen Brethil.  Every year he would come to fetch me, and every year I would grumble that I would rather keep it here, in peace.  This is my first Yule here . . . and I have neither his company nor peace."

Regret was the steel edge that bit deepest.  "That is a grief.  But do not wound your heart further with the memory of old discontent.  If he did not think your company worth the complaints, he would not have come for you.  Are not kin ever an alloyed blessing?"

She wiped her face and blew her nose in a corner of her shawl.  "You have a sister, I think."

Who had spoken, and when?  "If Thyrnir is my sister-son, I suppose I must."

"We have kept you—and he—from her this Yule."

"That is not uncommon among Dwarves.  She will not grudge you, since she, too, might have been mourning a brother slain."

"As well as a husband."

"Yes."  She was leading him onto ground where he would rather not tread, but the reminder of vengeance unmet provided a clear way out.  "I wish I could have paid you in the coin you desired," he said, with unfeigned regret.  "The death of these fiends."

She sighed and hugged her shawl closer about her hunched shoulders.  "No matter.  This is better: life, not death.  It is always better to build than to kill."

That was a woman's thought.  "Except when one must kill to preserve what has been built."  He clasped his hands on his stick as if it were the helve of an axe.  "So—you are satisfied by the work?  The debt is paid?"

"More than amply.  I wonder if I am not now in your debt."

"Spare me your obstinate generosity, Saelon.  Let us end this.  Yea or nay?"

"Yea," she said simply, and stared blindly toward the sea.

Why was she so downcast?  One would have thought she greatly valued her hold on him, though she had never sought profit from it.  In such situations, a Dwarf must expect to ransom his life and honor high, in gold and gems and gear of war.  Yet she herself took nothing from this, not even trifles such as she had from Oddi and Rekk; what she had received she had passed on to her people, without hesitation.

Her brother had chosen well when he sent them into her care.

"Good," Veylin declared, loosening his grip on his stick.  "I would now treat with a neighbor lord, not my benefactress."

Saelon turned her gaze to him, head canted like a baffled hawk.  "Do you expect some difference?"

"From you, perhaps not—you do not seem to keep account of give and take like most folk, though some others of your people are near as bad.  But I, in case you have forgotten it, am a Dwarf, and I would be free to strike a good bargain, and say no to a poor one.  I could hardly haggle with you when I was in your debt."

A rent in the clouds gave light enough to see her bemused smile clear.  "What bargain would you make with folk so poor as us?"

"The night your brother was here, he said he could wish that you might have neighbors such as us.  I have had time to reflect on that.  Evil things are abroad, and in general Men are not so friendly to Dwarves as they once were.  You are poor and weak now," he agreed, "but if your fortunes do not worsen, in twenty years there will be a hundred of you, and Halmir and Gaernath will be stern Men of war wanting mail and blades.  Maelchon is already in love with the mild climate and longing for a plough to prepare for planting.  We can supply that plough . . . in return for a share of the harvest."

"Hm."  Saelon considered him.  "I think I ought to let Maelchon strike that bargain."

Veylin gave an exaggerated sigh of regret and shook his head.  "See the difference it makes, Lady?"

"And the _raugs_?"

"That," he told her grimly, "is not a matter for bargaining.  The only reckoning we will make is of the bodies of the slain."

"We also desire a reckoning with them," she claimed, "but we have few men and our weapons harm them little."

"I have spoken with Tarain.  I wish the troll-spears had reached your brother: it is perilous to close with these things, it seems; they have a long grasp.  A good sword wounds, but unless you slay with the first stroke, you have no chance of another.  Axes may be little better."

Saelon looked pointedly at his stick.  "As you know too well."

He rubbed his knee.  "Indeed."  It was hard to deliver a killing thrust with a spear, and Dwarves used them too seldom for great skill.  Veylin vividly remembered his first meeting with Halladan, staring up the shaft of the Man's long spear.  And Partalan's boar-slaying prowess . . . .  "When we were here before, you said you would aid us towards the death of these fiends however you could.  Then you spoke only for yourself.  Will you now, as Lady of your people, ally with us against this evil?"

"Gladly," she said, her voice both cold and eager, and offered her hand.

Veylin accepted her handclasp, as he had accepted her brother's.  She, too, was a Man they could do business with.

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

_I think, here is your emblem_  
_To hang in the future sky,  
_ _Not the cross, not the hive,_

_But this; bright power, dark peace,_  
_Fierce consciousness joined with final  
_ _Disinterestedness,_

_Life with calm death; the falcon's_  
_Realist eyes and act  
_ _Married to the massive_

_Mysticism of stone,_  
_Which failure cannot cast down  
_ _Nor success make proud._

—Robinson Jeffers, "Rock and Hawk"

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Notes

**Pintle** : an upright pin on which another part turns, as in a hinge.

**Cauldron chains** : during the Iron Age and Medieval periods, large pots were usually hung over fires by hooking them to [chains fixed to the roof beams](http://www.outremer.co.uk/images/tower/kitchen.gif) or in the masonry of chimneys.

**Boar** : traditionally considered the most dangerous animal to hunt; they usually killed hounds and often hunters.  Boar spears would have a crossbar near the point to prevent the stuck boar from running up the shaft to gore the hunter; killing a boar from horseback was considered better training for war than jousting.  Boar's head was commonly served at Christmas, with particular carols.

**Stone** : a locally variable British unit of weight; usually reckoned as 14 pounds, but for meat 8 pounds.

**Crabs** : crabapples; like sloes, the fruit is better after it is dried.

**Sledge** : not a sledgehammer, but a wheelless cart like a toboggan, used to haul loads short distances (for instance, hauling manure out to the fields).  Because of the roughness of the terrain, wheeled vehicles were not used in the Highlands until roads were first built in the 18th century AD.

**"steel edge that bit deepest"** : steel is harder and therefore more brittle than iron; a blade made entirely of steel would be too likely to shatter for practical use.  Therefore knives and weapons have steel edges on iron or mixed iron-steel bodies.

**"Rock and Hawk"** : the first three stanzas of this poem open the story; the following four close it.


	12. When, Where, and Who

Since my Dûnhebaid stories have a number of characters and locations of my own devising, a crib sheet may be useful.  After dealing with time and place, I have provided a character list, broken down by race.  Principals are listed first, in order of appearance; other characters are given in alphabetical order for easier reference.

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**Time**

There were, very properly given the cultural diversity present, several different calendars in use in Middle-earth during the Third Age.  While it would be easier—on me as well as my readers—to simply translate these into English equivalents, that would deprive me of an ethnic marker for my characters and a very realistic source of confusion and intellectual friction between folk of different cultures.  To try and minimize the bafflement of readers who have not memorized the Sindarin month-names used by the Dúnedain, and also continued repitition in notes, I provide a list below.  For a [fuller treatment of the coordination of the Western Gregorian calendar with those of Third-Age Eriador](http://astele.co.uk/stories/chapter_view.cfm?stid=7518&spordinal=1), please follow the embedded link.

                        Dúnedain

**May**                 Lothron

**June**                 Nórui

**July**                  Cerveth

**August**             Urui

**September**       Ivanneth

**October**           Narbeleth

**November**       Hithui

**December**        Girithron

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**Place**

I list here only places of my own invention or naming, in alphabetical order, with translations of their names and information on my sources of inspiritation, where those are particularly strong.  If you do not recognize some other place-name, please consult your favorite Tolkien references.

**Aegas Cerch** : Sindarin, "sickle peak."  A mountain with a prominent cirque in the northern Blue Mountains.

**Cîl-en-Ostrad** : Sindarin, "cleft of the street."  A pass in the northern Blue Mountains where an ancient dwarf-road ran from Beleriand to Mount Gundobad; little used since Orcs seized Gundobad in the Second Age.  The dwarf-road is also my invention.

**Craigenthôr** : compound, Scots Gaelic _creag an_ "crag of the" and Sindarin _en-thôr_ , "of the eagle."  A hill in the middle of Srathen Brethil.

**Echad Gaearon** : Sindarin, "camp (of) great sea."  A name briefly used for **Habad-e-Mindon**.

**Hithbrae** : compound; Sindarin _hîth_ , "mist" and Scots _brae_ , "hillside."  An Edain shieling in the northern Blue Mountains, six leagues from Rasgarth.

**Rasgarth** : Sindarin, "horn fort"; near-cognate with Scots Gaelic _rasgarradh_ , "heath enclosure."  An Edain settlement in the northern Blue Mountains, ten leagues from Habad-e-Mindon.

**Srathen Brethil** : compound; Scots Gaelic _srath_ , "strath, valley" (compare Sindarin _rath_ , riverbed) and Sindarin _en-brethil_ , "of the birches."  A glen in the eastern foothills of the Blue Mountains and the westernmost settlement of the Dúnedain, founded by refugees from the fall of Arthedain.

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**Men**

There are many different kinds of Men in Middle-Earth (LotR, App. F, "Of Men").  Since my stories are based in northwestern Eriador, most of the Men are either Dúnedain, the long-lived descendants of the Númenóreans, or Edain, descendants of the First Age Atani who did not remove to Númenor.  The Dunlendings or Swarthy Men, whose ancestors dwelt in the vales of the White Mountains before the arrival of the Númenórean founders of Gondor, were apparently of Easterling rather than Atani stock; they were usually hostile to the Dúnedain and Edain peoples such as the Rohirrim.  It seems that many of this folk settled in the relatively empty lands around the old border between Arnor and Gondor.

Since kinship was an important bond, I have specified the exact relationship between significant people.  For instance, Gaernath is Saelon's cousin; to be precise, he is her FaFaDaSoSo—father's father's daughter's son's son.  I might simply say Gaernath was her great-aunt's grandson, but in these patrilineal societies, it is important to see who is in the same line.  I follow Tolkien's convention of adding a dagger symbol (†) before the dates of untimely deaths; the names of those who are deceased, from any cause, are italicized.  All dates given are in the Third Age.

Principals

**Saelon** (2790–  ): solitary Dúnadaneth with a passion for the Sea

**Halladan** (2781–  ): Saelon's eldest brother, Lord of Srathen Brethil

**Gaernath** (2832–  ): Saelon's Edain cousin (FaFaDaSoSo)

Other Men

**Aniel** (2812–  ): Edain huntsman

**Artan** (2828–  ): Edain lad

**Bereth** (2816–  ): Haldorn's youngest sister

**Brandir** : Edain of the Blue Mountains

**Bred** (2812–  ): Gede's servant

**Drust** : Edain of the Blue Mountains

**Eithel** (2832–  ): Haldorn's eldest daughter

**_Emerwen_ ** _(2789–?): Saelon's Dúnedain cousin, presumed dead_

**Fransag** (2815–  ): Maelchon's wife

**Frest** : Edain of Srathen Brethil

**Gede** (2842–  ): Gaernath's father

**Gràinne** (2786–  ): Maelchon's mother-in-law

**Haldorn** (2784–  ): Halladan's cousin (FaBrSo)

**Halmir** (2835–  ): Halladan's son and heir

**Halpan** (2821–  ): Haldorn's younger brother

**Hanadan** (2841–  ): Haldorn's youngest son

**Handin** (2837–  ): Haldorn's son

**Handir** (2829–  ): Haldorn's eldest son

**Hunthor** : Edain of Srathen Brethil

**Mais** (2825–  ): Gaernath's eldest brother

**Maelchon** (2810–  ): Edain of Srathen Brethil

**_Minuial_ ** _(2778–†2847): Saelon's elder sister_

**Morwen** (2844–  ): Haldorn's daughter

**Muirne** (2830–  ): Artan's sweetheart

**Naugton** : Edain swordsman serving Halladan

**Núneth** (2803–  ): Halladan's wife

**Orleg** : Edain of the Blue Mountains

**Partalan** (2801–  ): Dunlending swordsman and harper serving Halladan

**Rian** (2832–  ): Halladan's daughter

**Tarain** (2818–  ): Edain swordsman serving Halladan

**Tearlag** (2815–  ): Edain serving woman

**Urwen** (2795–  ): wife of Haldorn

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**Dwarves**

There are seven kindreds or houses of Dwarves: Tolkien focused his attention on the Longbeards, whose Father was Durin the Eldest, who woke in the Misty Mountains (HoME XII: _The Peoples of Middle-Earth_ , "Of Dwarves and Men"), but I am more interested in the Firebeards, who arose in the Blue Mountains in the west.  All of the Dwarves listed here are Firebeards.

While some authors have suggested that Dwarves follow a social pattern similar to that of later medieval guilds, I have seen no evidence for such a rigidly hierarchical system among them.  ("Master" is a title other races give them; Dwarves do not seem to use it for each other.  The word "apprentice" appeared in _The Hobbit_ in reference to the sons of the Men of Dale.)  Therefore I have followed early medieval models: where a craftsman was not trained by his own kin, he would find a master (of the art) to work under until he had learned all he wished.  Given that Dwarves "ill endure the domination of others" ( _The Silmarillion_ , "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age"), I doubt they would bind themselves under another by anything except their own desire for the secrets of their craft and the deference they give to elders.  For lack of better "archaic" words to describe this mentor–protégé relationship, I have used "prentice" for the protégé, but it does not have the specific (lowest) rank connotation the term "apprentice" has under a guild system.

Principals

**Veylin** , son of Vali (2708–  ): gemsmith

**Thyrnir** , son of Thekk (2798–  ): Rekk (BrSo) and Veylin's nephew (SiSo)

**Rekk** , son of Ekki (2686–  ): waterwright

Other Dwarves

**Ingi** , son of Iolf (2769–  ): prentice to Rekk

**Nordri** , son of Narði (2661–  ): stonemason

**Nyr** , son of Nordri (2763–  ): stonemason

**Nyrað** , son of Nordri (2772–  ): stonemason

**Oddi** , son of Nidi (2673–  ): stonemason

**_Thekk_ ** _, son of Ekki (2695–†2847): gemsmith; Veylin's friend and brother-in-law_

**Thiolf** , son of Thorð (2776–  ): prentice to Nordri

**_Vestri_ ** _, son of Oddi (2775–†2847): prentice to Veylin_

**Vitnir** , son of Nali (2735–  ): ironmaster; Veylin's cousin (FaBrSo)

**Vitr** , son of Nali (2724–  ): ironmaster; Veylin's cousin (FaBrSo)

* † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † * † *

 Creatures of Note

**Craec** : a young raven who followed Thekk

**Dûnsûl** : Halpan's stallion

**Môrfast** : Halladan's prize black stallion


End file.
